Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land 1666907626, 9781666907629

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Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land

Verbal Transformation, Despair, and Hope in The Waste Land Shudong Chen

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Chen, Shudong, 1956- author. Title: Verbal transformation, despair, and hope in The waste land / Shudong Chen. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022005119 (print) | LCCN 2022005120 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666907629 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666907636 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965. Waste land. | Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), 1888-1965—Literary style. | Despair in literature. | Hope in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PS3509.L43 W36366 2022 (print) | LCC PS3509.L43 (ebook) | DDC 821/.912—dc23/eng/20220310 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005119 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022005120 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

For Roger T. Ames

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Preface: Challenge and Choice

1

1

The Performative Nature of Language

2

The Revelation of the Performative Power and Verbal Functionalism of Language

155

Futility and Hope: Retaining the Unretainable Life in Art as in Real World

185

Turbulent Emotion that Still Moves as Sculpted in Perpetual Tranquility

221

Sounds of Words and Sounds of Thunder and Hope

251

3 4 5

81

Bibliography297 Index309 About the Author

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Whether “the style,” as Buffon and Montaigne both maintain, “is the person” or any discourse even philosophy, as Nietzsche emphasizes, could ultimately be autobiographical by nature and may even often appear as its author’s “involuntary confession.”1 In this regard, the book itself indeed also becomes so “autobiographical” by nature often as my much-needed self-reflective moments for all my “emotion [gratefully] recollected in tranquility,”2 especially in terms of how the book benefits so significantly from various kinds of kindly personalized institutional support. For such indispensable personalized institutional support, it is simply too many to count but always includes, first and foremost, the former and current colleagues of Staff Development, Technical Help Center, Educational Technology Center, and International Education under the insightful stewardship of Professor Carolyn Kadel, its legendary founder and the first director, and Dr. Tom Patterson, her former mindfully experimental successor to date with their steady focus on International Education as the indispensable part of humanities education for cultivating, as Albert Einstein so insisted, “a harmoniously developed person,” not merely a job-training occasion for something of “a well-trained dog”;3 the two directors’ pivotal focus remains steadily fine-tuned through the instrumental coordination and consistent execution via Janette Jasperson, the office’s utmost conscientious and resourceful coordinator, who upholds Einstein’s insightful vision of the important mission that humanities education so irreplaceably sustains. Of so many in my own division and department, I must thank in particular Jim Lane, dean of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and Dr. Allison Smith, professor and chair of Art History and Humanities, for their truly “enlightened and humane” leadership that significantly facilitates my teaching and research.4 For various thought-occasioning talks in hallways, at ix

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social gatherings, or around the dinner table, I must also thank my current and former colleagues Drs. Dennis Arjo, Sarah Aptilon, Michael Robertson, Tim Hoare, Michael Hembree, Bill Stockton, Tom Patterson, Bill Lamb, Jerry Baird, among all others simply too numerous for me to thank them here one by one. But, as particularly footnoted in the preface, for their thoughtinspiring “tips,” I must also express my feeling of gratitude to my readily spontaneous Robert Frost-reciting friend, Connie Brickner, the former benefits specialist of Human Resources, Jeanne Murphy, our former adjunct professor of humanities always with her unusual but so naturally performative and contagiously robust dry sense of humor, and, as footnoted in chapter 1, Kazuyo Rumbach sensei, the former adjunct professor of Japanese, my utmost conscientious Japanese language teacher and colleague. However, even so, this long list as my thankful notes to my mind-enriching current and former colleagues must include in particular Omar Conrad, professor of philosophy, a devoted reader of Cormac McCarthy but, first and foremost, a superb teacher, who acutely knows how to make the otherwise esoteric philosophical concepts and tricky logical and ethical issues exoteric or readily accessible enough for students by means of films, such as The Matrix, and games playing. This list must certainly also emphatically include Larry Thomas, late former professor and chair of the Department of Fine Art, whose painting “Problem with Curiosity,” now collected by Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, is the piece that I referred to in chapter 1 of this book along with Wassily Kandinsky’s work and Samuel Buckett’s Waiting for Godot as the indispensable mutual illumination; together, they allow me to show how in the particular context of The Waste Land even the sheer nonsenses and silence could serendipitously reveal something so meaningful, which can, nonetheless, “only be shown, not said” through all the meaningfully meaningless colorful chaos and senseless noises of silence at least according to Wittgenstein as Bertrand Russell so emphasizes.5 For this and all my other publications, neither would I ever forget a special “thank you” to Janet Brooks, the librarian extraordinaire, for her timely and all-time support of my research especially through an efficient interlibrary loan system. She went out of her way to secure the last sets of books and articles that I need for this book even days before her retirement when she was literally cleared of all her official duty. I must also thank Janette Jasperson, the coordinate extraordinaire, of International Education, for saving me so much of my time, headache, and particularly my officially declared “permanent damaged vision” through her timely and all-time help on all the logistic matters related with my professional activities off campus or overseas. Janette is also one of the colleagues on campus whom I often referred to in my publications especially in the most recent ones for the

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thought-occasioning conversations that I enjoyed with her so much from time to time at the dinner table as in her office or online, such as the one referred to in chapter 1 as regards our discussion following a Zoom presentation on Waiting for Godot on Wednesday, April 7, 2021, by Dr. Andrea Broomfield, chair and professor of English, and author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England: A History (Praeger, 2007). Of a further long-term personal relationship that so fruitfully inspires me, I am deeply grateful to my former colleague-turned-longtime thoughtprovoking close friends Doreen Maronde, Carolyn Kadel, and Dr. Chuck Bishop (a historian, author, traveler, master teacher, impressive reader of Cormac McCarthy, seasoned gourmet, acute connoisseur of quality wine, liquor, and beer, experienced golfer, and marvelously disciplined amazing casino games player), and Sheila Philip (and her husband, “mon frère,” Bob Hartley, a Francophile local musician with a remarkably gracious, smooth, wittily spontaneous self-effacing sense of humor).6 For the incessant and ever-present soul-nourishing inspiration, I am particularly grateful to my family-become longtime friends Pam and John Peck,7 Emiko (“Emy”) and Kunihiko (“Sam”) Hamamoto,8 and Grandma Martha LaMear,9 Bill and Adam Peck, Dr. Lynn Rubright, author and botanist with a vision beyond the “façade” of mere phenomena of life itself, along with Ding Yuan, my devoted wife and soul companion for over thirty-five years, Deanie Pamela Chen, my daughter, my heart-soothing, and soul-humbling, “elfish” only child, currently a second-year law student at NYU and also an actively publishing photographer with modeling as her sidekicks, For the steadfast and timely all-time support and unequivocal trust in my ability as a scholar, I am always so grateful to Ziren Yuan and Ainong Wu, my beloved late parents-in-law, Ning Yuan and Yuwei Guo, my remarkable and utterly unselfish, loving, caring, and utmost supportive “elder” sister and brother-in-law. Together with Kunhao Xu, my beloved late mother, all these close longtime friends and families inspire me to have sensed hope in The Waste Land behind, beneath, between, beyond, or despite despair through the still-undetected vital but subtle verbal transformation. In the context of The Waste Land, hope is indeed so irreducibly as much inherent in despair as tenaciously indicative of the often unduly overlooked intellectual and spiritual transformation remaining so deep-rooted or inherent in each overlooked instance of pivotal verbal transformation. This overlooked transformation serendipitously sustains The Waste Land as much as the fundamental humanity-defining and utmost personal bond that so always sustains me through my friends and families. They all quietly nourish and personify this indispensable bond. These humanity-defining “family value” even appears so significantly confirmed in the often mind-bewildering incidents of Gautama Buddha’s “abandoning” and returning to his family before and

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after his enlightenment along with the pivotal message of Luke 14:26, which often so ironically shocks so many in ways that will be discussed in the book. With Pam, for instance, it would be utterly impossible not to be constantly reminded of the utmost importance of religion, which is so crucial for understanding not only the text of The Waste Land but also T. S. Eliot himself as a “warped saint”-turned brilliant poet,10 even if I cannot often see everything eye to eye with her especially in terms of her religious view, which, as Masao Maruyama might so put it, is her “passionate sense of reality.”11 In fact, as John knows firsthand, there are few in the world who could truly make Pam furious or “mad,” and I am definitely one whether because of my usual stubbornness not to budge in an argument with her or for my dogged refusal to cut short my untidy hippie-like long hair, but neither would there be anyone else on the planet, other than “Pammy,” who would indeed make me realize, not in words but in deeds, how important religion could truly be in one’s life.12 If so, nor would it ever be possible for me to understand adequately the text of The Waste Land, either, not to think of John especially in terms of the brilliance of his always so readily fine-tuned skepticism, staunch Midwestern pragmatism, and unequivocal sanity as a devoted lawyer, professor, citizen, patriot, husband, father, son-in-law, and friend. Literally, as I have remained so firmly convinced for over thirty years since I first knew him, John would always remain so sturdily a Starbuck, that is, the scrupulous and steadfast first mate of Pequod, wherever he is or under whatever circumstances, even amidst the entire maddening crew under Ahab; he would in a word always remain a magnificent “buoy” or a “buoyant float” on the great ocean. Indeed, however frequently or drastically the great ocean of life would constantly change its currents or tides in this way or that way, John buoys along with it as loyal or faithful as he would possibly be in the role of a buoyant float but always ultimately stay right there in the middle as he has always been so anchored deep down between the fickle and fuzzy tides as a staunch Kansan, a mild skeptic, cautious intellect, or a significantly insignificant part of the mainstream of the great ocean of life. Like Pam and John, all these intimate souls as mentioned, always remain so indispensable as my humanity-defining and sanity-sustaining friends and family; together, they all enable me to make sense of the madly whirling vortex of this world, of which The Waste Land increasingly becomes such an unparalleled literary paragon. I need them as my soulmates to find myself in a vantage position “at the still point of the [madly] turning world” (FQ BN ii). This is “the still point,” which could be so irreplaceable for me to understand or recognize how “the fire and the rose are one” (FQ LG v), ultimately, after the “Renaissance” occasioned with The Waste Land and followed by The

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Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday through the duly cathartic utterance of sheer despair and the utmost expression of lamentation. Thus, based closely in spirit upon the most recent development in prosodic studies, the book literally attempts another round of “philosophical investigations” while arguing a prosodically explainable literary case regarding how a hidden phenomenon of verbal transformation would serendipitously turn the conspicuous message of despair into the vehicle of the message of hope hidden in the text of The Waste Land, which is certainly known for its “blasphemous” scenes of debauchery and “image of destruction”; the book argues the case particularly as a logical follow-up of my most recent monograph Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar (Lexington 2020), which itself is meant to field-test on the formidable literary texts by T. S. Eliot the very validity and virtue of the new prosodicphilosophically based interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary approach that I have developed in Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody (Lexington 2018). If so, all the projects started primarily in one way or another with the Asian Studies Development Program (ASDP), especially when the programs were so fruitful under the legendary co-directorship of Drs. Betty Buck, Roger Ames, and Peter Hershock. ASDP indeed so fruitfully exemplifies how the indispensable personalized institutional support is often to be found as much off campus as on campus. In fact, almost all the major cases discussed in this book and my other two Lexington Books initially took shape as conference papers delivered regularly at various annual conferences, such as ASDP National Conference, International Conference on Chinese Prosodic Grammar in addition to the seasonal ones, that is, East-West Philosophers’ Conference at The East-West Center/The University of Hawaii, Manoa. In one way or another, before they become further germinated in the book, most of the fundamental thoughts or ideas that sustained the conference papers were developed and published afterward in the form of journal articles and book chapters in places such as International Comparative Literature (formerly Cowrite: Journal of Comparative Literature and Culture), Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies, Taiwan, Journal of Prosodic Studies, EastWest Connections, and Dynamics of Cultural Counterpoints: Essays in Asian Studies (2014). For the opportunities of presenting and publishing the papers, I thank all the conference organizers, anonymous reviewers, and editors, particularly Dr. Yunhua Liu, editor-in-chief of International Comparative Literature, and David Jones, the former editor of East-West Connections and coeditor of Dynamics of Cultural Counterpoints. Along with my efforts and activities in scholarly research, presentation, and publication, this study also results from my gradually accumulated experiences through actual classroom teaching over a long period of time

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in the United States since 1993. Other than those specifically referred to or acknowledged in the book, I thank all the students for their engaging and inspiring interactions with me not only in the courses that I have been teaching at Johnson County Community College since Fall 1999 but also in all those that I taught at the University of Kansas as a graduate teaching assistant from 1993 to 1999, such as Western Civilization I and II, Masterpieces of World Literature, English Composition I and II, and both regular and Honors course of Eastern Civilization. For such invaluable teaching experiences that enrich the book and the ones before it, I am deeply indebted to Dr. James Woelfel, professor emeritus of philosophy and the legendary former director of Western Civilization and Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, for initiating my teaching career in the United States with an offer for me to teach my own Western Civilization courses as a graduate teaching assistant and as the first-ever nonnative speaker of English at the position. For this book and all my previous publications that snowball into this one, I must also thank my own teacher and friend, Dr. Alfred Habegger, professor emeritus of English of the University of Kansas, a well-known Henry James and Emily Dickinson expert and literary biographer. Upon hearing the job offer that I received from JCCC for teaching “humanities” in February 1999, Al immediately said to me, point-blank, as in his usual frank, blunt, or often so strikingly forthright way, “You’re a dilettante, and you’re cheating, if you don’t publish anything on each subject you teach.” I instantly took this closerange shot to my heart, since then, working hard in teaching, writing, and publishing simply because I do not want to be such a cheating dilettante.13 However, as for having literally brought to life this study on The Waste Land and the preceding one on Four Quartets, no one, ever, could ultimately be more instrumental than Holly Buchanan, acquisitions editor of Lexington Books, for her remarkable professional insight, perspective, and efficiency.14 For the well-being that the book enjoys, I am also as much grateful to the editorial board for the more content-specific book title than my own initial one as to the anonymous reviewer for his or her thoughtful and thorough comments particularly upon the book title among various other valuable suggestions.15 For exactly the same kind of professional insight that I benefit so much from as what Henry James called the utmost primordial thought-germinating “idée” that fruitfully resulted in the current form of this book and my other two Lexington Books preceding it, I am grateful to Dr. Shengli Feng. Indeed, I have benefited so much from Shengli not only through the timely gifts of his publications that mark the significant developments in prosodic studies as a new fruitful linguistic perspective but also through the numerous conversations and discussions that I enjoyed with him at the dinner table, over the phone, or via email across a considerable period of time as

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early as his distinguished tenure at Harvard (2003–2010). So am I deeply grateful to Professor Longxi Zhang and Professor Jay Parini for their prompt and kind endorsements to my 2020 Lexington book on Four Quartets that snowballs into this one at my last-minute request as a junior scholar from a community college they never even met. I am also as much thankful for the kind permission from Jay for me to use his poetry for this book as for the pleasurable occasions of communicating with him about his poetry via email. For their heart-warming kindness, collegiality, and scholarly support, I also owe many thanks to Drs. Robin Wang, professor of philosophy at Loyola Merriment University, Los Angeles, and Ann Pirruccello, professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego. I thank them not only for the back-cover endorsements for my previous Lexington book on Four Quartets published in 2020 but also for their instrumental ideas that led me to understand further the text of The Waste Land. I was led to understand, for instance, how the very text could be further understood in terms of the notion of yinyang, which is, as Robin so brilliantly interpreted and as I so diligently quoted in the book, as the perfect “pattern of timing”; likewise, I was also led to understand how the same text could equally be further approached in terms of the notion of “philosophical imagination” that I explored in the part of book that concludes chapter 1 in ways as Ann initially introduced with reference to Michèle Le Dœuff’s The Philosophical Imaginary.16 For Dr. Roger Ames, a distinguished philosopher who also loves T. S. Eliot, the philosopher-poet, and to whom I have the honor to dedicate this book, I simply have too much to thank him for ever since I met Roger for the first time in 1999 at an ASDP-sponsored workshop in Memphis. I thank Roger for his timely and all-time help—from a request for the verification of quotations to a search for publishers, from asking him for his kind backcover endorsements to requesting for his inspiring foreword. Whether he was in Hawaii, China, India, or elsewhere, he would always so miraculously return my email almost instantly as if he was never away from his computer. Undoubtedly, for Wittgenstein, before we can even really see new things, we simply need to take off a “pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at” but “it never occurs to us to take them off.”17 For Proust, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”18 If so, in a period of over twenty years, Roger is the one who has helped me not only to take off such glasses but also to acquire a new pair of eyes to see the world afresh through his works and personal contacts I enjoyed with him. No doubt, in such a long period of time, Roger literally made me realize how each literary text when even labeled as utmost Western, such as T. S. Eliot’s poetry, would virtually still stand as “deeply interpenetrated living

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cultural ecologies.”19 Meanwhile, Roger equally helped me realize how there were also the inevitable culturally conditioned specific “blind spots” peculiar to the native speakers of that language and culture, but it would thus also possibly become the good opportunities for the nonnative speakers to spot them from a different cultural perspective. Because the nonnative speakers may not wear the same type of specific “glasses” designed and mass-produced in the given language and culture or have the special “eyesight” or “vision” nurtured in the same linguistic and cultural milieu, they would therefore possibly see things quite afresh to discover even “the road not taken” within, between, or underneath the roads well-trodden. Meanwhile, however exclusively I had been trained as a literary scholar in English, Roger likewise also made me realize my own inner-cultural assets as a native speaker of Chinese even in the studies of Western literature. “To quietly persevere in storing up what is learned, to continue studying without respite, to instruct others without [ever] growing weary,” is this not indeed the Roger I know as well (默而識之, 學而不厭, 誨人不倦，何有於我哉)?20

NOTES 1. Indeed, for Nietzsche, as he emphasizes in Beyond Good and Evil, “every great philosophy has been the confession of its maker, as it were his involuntary and unconscious autobiography” (13). 2. Wordsworth, William. “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” 168. 3. As Adam Smith so repeatedly emphasized not only in The Theory of Moral Sentiments but also in The Wealth of Nations, especially in the latter’s concluding part, the utmost importance of humanities education is also repeatedly emphasized by the greatest minds of science, such as Albert Einstein as quoted in the following passage from Education for Independent Thought from New York Times, October 5, 1952 or Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions (New York: Crown, 1982), 66, with italics added. It is not enough to teach man a specialty. Through it he may become a kind a useful machine but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquires an understanding of and a lively feeling for values He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he—with his specialized knowledge— more closely resembles a well-trained dog than a harmoniously developed person. He must learn to understand the motives of human beings . . . These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not—or at least not in the main—through textbooks. It is this that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the “humanities” as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy. Overemphasis on the competitive system and premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kill the spirit on which all cultural life depends, specialized knowledge included.

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4. A staunch and steadfast native Kansan, Jim owns an MFA from the University of Missouri–Kansas City and has been at JCCC for better than two decades, mostly with the Theatre Department as designer and technical director. With his wife Julie, he has also been a devoted parent to his three children and, unbelievably, to more than eighty foster children as well in ways that this remarkable kindness has already become a local legend. Allision is featured in chapter 4 along with her lakeside “Paradise” home and family, particularly her beloved “child,” Frank, all of which so serendipitously occasioned a lakeside dialogue that I had with my colleague Dr. Sarah Aptilon on Judaism and Jewry in China as an “anecdotal” illumination to my interpretation of “Death by Water.” 5. Russell, “Introduction,” x, italics added. 6. Along with Carolyn, the former director and the legendary founder of my college’s now full-fledging or rapidly flourishing International Education, Doreen is instrumental in my hiring in 1999 as an associate dean of Liberal Arts Division. Together with Sheilah, professor emeritus of theater and former chair of Theater Department, and my Japanophile 姉 (ane “elder sister”), they three were instrumental in pushing me to participate in ASDP, which has thus occasioned my fruitful careerremodeling process that resulted in this book and others before it. 7. It was over thirty years ago when Pam and John kindly hosted me a total stranger for free after I just arrived in America; it was also with their generous, thoughtful, all-time, and full-scale help that I finally settled down two weeks later in my own affordable room of an apartment within a walking distance to the university campus ready for my first semester as a graduate student in English at the University of Kansas, where John then taught as a law professor. All occurred so naturally as if prearranged after Pam happened to spot me appearing so lost, alone, at the almost deserted MCI Airport, Missouri, at midnight, when the appointed person from the university failed to show up to meet me there. Pam offered me a ride and then brought me directly to her own home after knowing that I literally had no place to go to even when we arrived at Lawrence, Kansas. It was also Pam and John who called then U.S Senator Nancy Kassebaum when my wife’s visa application ran into difficulty. With the senator’s kind letter of strong support, my wife soon arrived in Kansas to join me. “A couple years later,” as John still vividly recalled, “their daughter Deanie Pamela was born,” and Deanie, indeed, “was named after a character in a William Inge play, and after Pam.” This was exactly what occurred then in ways as John so clearly remembered in detail, “Pam and I had gone to a play, and also had the movie cassette lying on the counter. Pregnant Ding picked it up and read the characters’ names and exclaimed ‘Deanie, that’s what we’ll name her—it sounds Chinese American.’” 8. In the summer of 2003, while I was in Japan for the first time, between my conference and my scheduled field-study project, “Emy” and “Sam” also kindly hosted me, also room and board free, in their elegant traditional house with an astonishingly exquisite over 100-year-old private garden. They not only attended to my interest in the cultural aspects as particularly inherent and reflected in Japanese gardens and cuisine but also kindly toured me around, as special treats, in and out of Hiroshima to places as far as the almost southernmost city of Nagasaki.

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9. Martha LaMear was Pam’s beloved and blessed late mother, a brilliant bridge player, a very generous, loving, caring, and, even in her 90s, still a particularly “witty” Grandma to me and to my family. Often, she would give us a big check as Christmas gift. She would treat me to a steak dinner because she knew I liked steak. She would also like teasing me from time to time. She passed away quietly in peace at the age of 98 on September 4, 2021. Alas, we all miss her. 10. Gordon, An Imperfect Life, 534. 11. Masao Maruyama, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 35. Maruyama defines “religion” as one’s “passionate sense of reality.” 12. This personal influence that Pam so personifies indeed sustains me with my steady focus on the crucial religious aspect of The Waste Land, which could be so often unduly overestimated as much as underestimated. The religious aspect could eventually even reveal itself as a pivotal clue of the real causes that would ultimately account for the intricate tension of despair and hope that I try to emphasize as inherent in the text of The Waste Land particularly along with Michael Holt’s observation. Indeed, as Holt so indicates, “Perhaps the reason for so many critics failing to recognize the heretofore unrecognized clues to the poem’s real issues,” that is, “its complexities and . . . its real tension” (Holt, “Hope and Fear,” 30) is ultimately the issue of religion, which not only remains hidden but also surreptitiously arouses the conflicting messages of despair and hope. This issue certainly needs to be particularly dealt with in terms of Eliot’s exuberance as a “warped saint” turned poet. However, as Holt also rightly further points out, such a crucial religious aspect that defines the fundamental tenets of The Waste Land was unfortunately often underestimated due to Pound’s undeniable influences. Virtually as Eliot’s literary mentor, Pound maintained a crucial role particularly in the shaping of The Waste Land. In other words, critics, as Holt argues, could therefore all be “understandably impressed and intimidated by Pound’s deftness and confidence in shaping the poem and by his vigorous denunciation of certain passages” (ibid.) and this vigorous denunciation could largely result from “Pound’s unsympathetic, even caustic attitudes toward Eliot’s religious interests” (ibid.). Even so, regardless of how or how much Pound might have thus likely missed or even dismissed what is truly essential, that is, Eliot’s otherwise exuberant “movement in a religious direction, even if it was predictably unstable and confused” (ibid.), Eliot’s religious exuberance persisted; it still persisted despite Pound’s undeniable literary authority, which would certainly cause overshadowing eclipses from time to time over the poem’s essential religious implication. The Waste Land, then, as a poem, was indeed always “still under construction, reflecting a poet who was himself under construction and who, because of the relative instability of his condition, was unable to shape the poem as he—and he alone—knew it should be shaped” (ibid.). In this regard, “the best critical approach to a work of art,” as Holt emphasizes, should, therefore, be “the artifact’s being as it is” as what we must “most fully accounts[ ] for” (ibid.). This emphasis on “the artifact’s being as it is” (ibid.) could thus also mean a steady attention to the implied but unduly eclipsed religious aspects. Undoubtedly, “by such a standard, critical efforts to date have failed to account for The Waste Land, to explain its complexities and identify its real tension” (ibid.).

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If so, what these critical efforts all failed to do could be spotted, in other words, at nowhere else but in the text itself, that is, its religious aspect-related or -revealing “artifact’s being as it is,” particularly as the “complexities and . . . its real tension” (ibid.). All these unrecognized “complexities” and “real tension” are therefore not only so inherent in the text itself but also often emerge as prosodically accountable hidden verbal transformation especially in ways that the book explores. These still unaccountable literary facts could thus be explored as what could truly account for the “complexities” and “tension” of Eliot’s exuberant but still unstable mood and movement in the search of his own “Holy Grail.” For the fruitful critical attention that I have maintained to the religious aspects of The Waste Land, I am as much grateful to Pam as to the anonymous reviewer for timely bringing Michael Holt’s argument to my attention. For Michael Holt. See Holt, “Hope and Fear,” 30. 13. Al’s influences on me is immeasurable. I used to think of Henry James as much an “exquisite” as often a “fuss-making” novelist until I took a course titled “American Realism” taught by Al. Al’s class soon led me to a second look at James, which eventually resulted in a dissertation published afterward as my first book Henry James: The Essayist behind the Novelist (Mellen, 2003). I thank Al also for the decisive influences from him that rekindled my interest in Emily Dickinson. This rekindled interest in Dickinson then became further substantiated especially with a precious opportunity for me to deliver a paper on Dickinson at International Symposium on Emily Dickinson at Fudan University, Shanghai, in September 2014, thanks to the special last-minute arrangement by Drs. Cristanne Miller, Martha Nell Smith, and Baihua Wang. The paper was published afterward in Cowrite with its major arguments further germinated in Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody especially in chapters 2 and 4. Along with his wife Nellie, Al was initially admitted by Stanford University as a graduate in mathematics. One day after he excitedly told his classmate how he solved a difficult math problem in two hours and then saw to his dismay how this classmate solved the same problem in two minutes, Al quickly decided to change his major in Stanford from mathematics to English because he said that did not want to end up as a mere “mediocre” in the field of mathematics even if he could manage to graduate from Stanford with a PhD in mathematics. Other than traveling from time to time to the metropolitan areas, such as Boston and New York, for research in the big libraries there, Al now thoroughly enjoyed his semi-reclusive life, with Nellie, as independent scholar and writer deep in the mountain of Oregon in a wooden house built completely by himself and Nellie each summer year by year before his early retirement in 1998. While enjoying his truly unbounded intellectual and spiritual freedom in nature and with nature, Al also occasionally runs into various such “fun” incidents, such as with bears visiting them during midnight knocking on the door, peeping through the windows, or helping themselves with foods whenever they are available. One time, one bear even knocked off Nellie’s hat from behind and then quietly walked away while Al and Nellie were taking their daily walk. Perhaps, the bear did not like Nellie’s hat or liked it so much to become jealous. Al sometimes also has to generate electric power with their power generator to send an email.

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14. Holly’s remarkable professional insight, perspective, and efficiency could indeed even be observed as regards her timely help with the picture chosen as the book cover for my 2020 Lexington book Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese jar. The picture still draws many admirations and questions for its meaning. The picture certainly in so many ways indicates such an image as if of a pure pre-lapsed state of noumenal being where and when “the fire and the rose are one” after “the Renaissance” of The Waste Land through the era of sheer despair of The Hollow Men and utmost lamentation of Ash Wednesday. So is the picture that Holly has also helped me to pick for this book with the images of the dead tree, the blue sky, and the sunshine so intimately mingled together to reflect truly the message of despair and hope in ways that the book explores. Does the sunshine in the picture come from the sun that sets or rises? It’s so beautifully or ambiguously hard to tell. Even if the sunshine does come from the sun that sets, the sun sets for today only for itself to rise again for tomorrow. The picture even so instantly reminded me at the first sight the famous poetic line by Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772–842), the remarkable Tang poet and philosopher, “沉舟側畔千帆過，病樹前頭萬木春” (chén zhōu cè pàn qiān fān guò, bìng shù qián tóu wàn mù chūn), which describes how thousands of ships sail by where many have sunken and myriad trees and flowers bust in blossoms where so many others withered away. 15. Indeed, thanks to the remarkable observation of the book title from the anonymous reviewer as regards the title’s pivotal implication along with the reviewer’s suggestion for a content-related adjustment, the meaning of the work becomes serendipitously further clear even to myself. The current title is initially suggested by Lexington’s editorial boarder, and it is much better than my own original one, that is, “The Waste Land in the Light of Void.” Even so, based upon his or her clear understanding of what the book primarily emphasizes, the reviewer still suggested a shift of the given word order with hope switching its order with despair to foreground or prioritize the hidden message of hope in ways as the book so exactly intends against the widely perceived message of despair. However, thanks to the reviewer, the suggested adjustment, instead, quite so serendipitously, further confirms the hidden value of the current title especially with its current word order, which carries an equally pivotal implication of “serendipity.” This hidden message of “serendipity” remains so utterly unknown even to myself in this seemingly quite plain, natural order or sequence that sustains the current title. The subtle and vital implication of “serendipity” could certainly be made more easily understood or appreciated with such an immediate reference to the famous phrase and line in classical Chinese literature respectively by Ouyang Xiu and Lu You. This hope-suggesting message of serendipity, for instance, could be read as emphasized by Ouyang Xiu 歐陽修 (1007–1072), one of the greatest essayists of North Song, in the phrase “峰回路轉” (fēng huí lù zhuǎn) in his masterpiece “On the Pavilion of Drunken Elderly Man” (醉翁亭記), a vivid literary account of his experience of serendipity. The phrase refers to his experience with a sudden scenic view that suddenly opens up upon a turn at the suspected end of a long-winding mountain path. The same message of serendipity is equally well suggested by Lu You 陸遊 (1125–1210), a brilliant poet of South Song, in the famous lines from

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the poem “Visit to the Village of West Mountain” (遊山西村): “山重水复疑無路, 柳暗花明又一村,” which describes how when the poet or his persona arrives “at the thought of a road that might end again, there suddenly jumps in sight another village in beautiful shades of willows and radiantly colorful flowers.” Therefore, to understand and appreciate best the message of hope that the reviewer so insightfully captures, it is better not to shift the word order of the current title’s. Not to let hope precede despair, it should instead let the current title maintain its word order so that the otherwise hidden message of hope could arise “naturally” and thus so “serendipitously” from behind, beneath, and between every single occasion of despair; the message of hope, in other words, could therefore arise even at the pivotal moment of despair with such a sudden revelation of a scenic view of hope, which would so timely open up upon a mere turn at the suspected end of a long-winding mountain path, indeed, as “峰回路轉.” 16. For further detail on the issue of yinyang, see Robin Wang, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138. Also, indeed, thanks to Ann’s brilliant presentation on the issues of “thinking in images” in philosophy at one of the ASDP national conferences many years ago, I was quickly led afterward to the fascinating book by Michèle Le Dœuff’s The Philosophical Imaginary, trans. Colin Gordon (London: Continuum, 1989), the book significantly refreshed my minds with the arguments that often reminded me of Giovanni Battista Vico along with Wittgenstein. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 103, 45e. 18. The source of this citation is Proust “La Prisonnière,” see Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time) (Vol. 5), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff; Chapter: II (The Verdurins Quarrel with M. de Charlus). 19. Roger Ames, back-cover endorsement on my book Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar. 20. Translated by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. in The Analects of Confucius: A Philosophical Translation (New York: Ballantine, 1998), 111.

Preface Challenge and Choice

No matter how apocalyptic as it may often so strike, there is always a message of hope inherent in everything that T. S. Eliot depicts and deplores in The Waste Land particularly as regards the ways he does it. However, to dig out the message in ways that make sense would not be so easy, especially in terms of all the allusions that make up the bulk of the text. At least over 100 easily or immediately identifiable ones, these allusions do not even include those “unpremeditated, accidental” ones1 that would spring out, a posteriori, sometimes so serendipitously from the text as much as through readers’ imagination. These “additional” allusions would often emerge in ways so contrary to or even beyond Eliot’s own intention, particularly when the readers would become so truly involved or inspired as his “mon semblable,—mon frère” (WL I). If “to understand a sentence,” indeed, as Wittgenstein so indicates, “means to understand a language,” whereas “to understand a language means to be master of a technique,”2 how many languages should we then need to become master of? How many, in other words, should we indeed be master of as is necessary to understand each and every allusion quoted directly from the foreign originals other than those in modern English, such as Latin, Italian, French, German, and Sanskrit, in addition to the English language spoken around the time when Shakespeare and the “University Wits” were still active? Furthermore, what is the technique that we must be masters of in order to do the job and where could we find it? Even if it would not be ever possible for me to be master of all the foreign tongues as supposedly required other than English, I do find my technique as timely shaped from as many contrary views over language as from Ludwig Wittgenstein and Johann Gottfried von Herder, among others. One, for instance, focuses on the issue of logic, syntax, and nonsenses, whereas the other concentrates on the communicative power of sound and its life-affirming “intermediary sensation” inherent in poetry 1

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as “a dictionary of the soul.”3 As will be discussed later in further detail, this “intermediary sensation” is literally as much compatible as with what Eliot calls as “auditory imagination,” which is “the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end.”4 However, what is further characteristic of the scenario about “auditory imagination,” emphasizes Eliot, is how “it works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and the obliterated and the trite, the current and the new and surprising, the most ancient and the most civilised mentality.”5 The “auditory imagination” therefore is thus truly of the fundamental “notion of ‘life,’” per se, in ways so profoundly inherent as much alive in poetry as in our common language as a whole.6 Because the “auditory imagination” could remain so inherently deep in our cultures as in our psyche, unfortunately, as a result, even Mathew Arnold, as one of the best literary critics, “in his account of poetry,” as Eliot points out, “does not perhaps go deep enough” to grasp it.7 On the other hand, with so many languages used in The Waste Land, there naturally also involved many cultural perspectives as inherent in each language used in the poem. Each cultural perspective would then certainly emerge with live impacts on the text through the “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” that each language evokes in ways peculiar to its own expression visually as much as audibly. Inevitably arising there would also be the necessity for comparison, which naturally becomes the crucial part of the “technique” that we need to “be master of” because, as Longxi Zhang so precisely puts it, “to compare or not to compare, unlike to be, or not to be: that is not the question”;8 it simply confronts us as “one of life’s little ironies that we have no choice but to choose”;9 even “on a most basic level, ontologically speaking, we cannot but compare,” that is, we must “compare all the time in order to differentiate, recognize, understand, make judgements or decisions, and act upon our decisions.”10 Clearly, “all our actions in cognitive and physical terms,” also argues Zhang, “depend on our comparisons, and we have no other alternative but to compare, because as human beings we all rush into existence in medias res, with our living conditions and social environment, including language and culture, already in place, and our life is always caught in what is given and what is yet possible, external reality and our dream, desires, and choices.”11 This is particularly the case with the immeasurably rich text of The Waste Land, which is so reminiscent of “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies”;12 it is, therefore, as Zhang continues, “impossible to conceive without comparison, and it is impossible to achieve an appropriate equilibrium between having too much and having not enough without making the right choice

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in comparison.”13 Such an approach by means of comparison is simply indispensable for any appropriate attempt to make sense of The Waste Land, especially in terms of all the literary allusions, which often appear as if so indiscriminately mixed of different sources, be they often so incongruously “high or low, [of] superfluity or destitution,” nonsensical or sensemaking, in English or in foreign tongues.14 This is the reason why I did not take on The Waste Land until I first finished my book on Four Quartets. Indeed, it is truly not until I finally came to realize how virtually everything that Eliot had experimented hard in The Waste Land often appeared so fruitfully culminated in Four Quartets from idea to poetry-composing technique that I found that time was ready for me to pick up The Waste Land once again for further study. As will be discussed later in detail, this Four Quartets first and The Waste Land next approach thus also indicates in this regard the pivotal position that The Waste Land holds as the irreplaceable nexus in Eliot’s poetic world; it remains, in other words, the indispensable center of relay that marks all the connections, transformations, and development of the major themes, forms, styles, and techniques so vital to the making of Eliot’s poetic world from its earliest stage to its latest one. Indeed, as indicated by Eliot himself as to how he would soon “settle down and get at something better which is tormenting [him] by its elusiveness in [his] brain” after “a year or two [for him] to throw off The Waste Land,” there is undoubtedly always something better yet to come as regards all the creative power that Eliot displays with the text of The Waste Land, even if “better” in what sense is certainly subject to arguments.15 Likewise, with “its complicated pattern and its own comparative obliquity to ideas,” such an “assurance” for perpetual expression of an everlasting poetic vision delivered in culminating harmony, however often so “hard to come by in The Waste Land,” is already there, as Calvin Bedient so suggests, beginning with The Waste Land until its ultimate delivery in Four Quartets; it is ultimately delivered, in other words, in ways or through the exquisite “form” or “pattern,” which particularly comes in shape since The Waste Land until it would eventually make words or music, as in Four Quartets, stand perfectly, like a Chinese jar, in its mode of perpetual still motion so vividly reflective of the subtle mood of the timely timeless time alive in its motionless motion.16 The text of The Waste Land, therefore, certainly marks the special difficulty or challenge that does seem to me as unsolved or unresolvable until “the form, the pattern” is reached at the stage of perpetual perfection of stillness in its motionless motion of timely timelessness in ways as the Chinese jar so stands for in Four Quartets. Everything of The Waste Land, until then, would certainly still remain as much irresistibly sense-bewitching but, at the same time, as inaccessibly wits-bewildering in ways as it often so vividly is in the text.

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No doubt, for Sigmund Freud as much as for T. S. Eliot, The Golden Bough always remained as influential as an “earth-shaking” work for its remarkably detailed content and, as would for everyone, for its impeccably crystal-clear style that delivers it, whereas “Frazer refused to read Freud and found The Waste Land impossible to understand.”17 However, for those who so truly choose to take on The Waste Land as readers, the poem would appear so irresistible in holding them in the increasingly intensified and constantly shifting modes and moods between the sense-bewitching and wits-bewildering mental states that concern not only the poem itself in particular but also Eliot’s own poetic world in general. From The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock through The Hollow Men and Ash Wednesday, there would be various phases of tough ontological and epistemological crises occurring to readers as Eliot’s “mon frère.” Undoubtedly, everything of Eliot’s poetic world, however, would so often occur as if so irrevocably pivoted upon or around the text of The Waste Land until finally everything would appear so culminated in Four Quartets even with “complete simplicity” (FQ V, v) in “humility of words” (FQ II, ii) and the accompanying triumphant choruses of “Ode to Joy” over the ultimate moment that reveals how “the fire and the rose are one” (FQ LG, v). Indeed, not until then, everything of The Waste Land would still remain as much utterly irreconcilable as the fire and the rose or as life and death as usual at least on the surface. Certainly, not really until that final moment or stage when all Eliot’s profound poetic themes, visions, and the intricate ways in delivering them become eventually as clearly revealed as in Four Quartets, the readers would still remain as if forever in the states of the utmost uncertainty. As is so often the case with reading The Waste Land, the readers would still, in other words, remain constantly shifted, back and forth, from the momentary sense-bewitching occasion to the recurrent mind-boggling frustration that follows immediately afterward. All in all, The Waste Land would always remain such an irreplaceable nexus that at once makes and marks Eliot’s constant changing poetic world, with which he experiments almost everything possible for the enrichment of “his poetic vision and expression.”18 THE WASTE LAND AS WETLAND AND READING AS WADING OR ISLAND-HOPPING ACROSS SWAMPS In this regard, with all its structurally well-modulated narrative fluidity and coherence particularly marked by its characteristic “virtuoso mastery of verbal music,”19 reading Four Quartets could be like flowing or floating in a big river that takes one along with currents in spite of oneself. Only with momentary occasions, one may find a pensive pause or sojourn for oneself

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to catch a breath while making reflections on the irresistible power of the currents that capture and carry one so irresistibly forward. One’s experience with The Waste Land, however, could be drastically different particularly in terms of its at least over 100 immediately identifiable literary references and allusions that one must deal with. These references and allusions do not even include so many other ones inherent or simply remaining hidden in the text but awaiting occasions to be timely “awakened” often in ways as “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” with all their instant text-impacting power. Reading The Waste Land could therefore be more like trying to wade across an immense piece of wetland and the only possible way for one to do so is to find a hidden but walkable trail in the right direction or to jump from one elevated dry spot to another on which one could land as “stepstones.” These “stepstones” would indeed be superb for whatever intended or involuntary “leapfrogging” or “island-hopping” strategy only if they are also luckily scattered around in the right direction. One would, in other words, never be able to move a step forward without, first and foremost, making sure of where one is, of which trail that one is following, and from which “stepstone” one could jump safely forward onto another without instead unfortunately slipping into the swamps around. One certainly must make sure whether there would be enough right “stepstones” available in the right direction for the next step forward. In this way of groping forward or moving around, one undoubtedly must be certain which elevated dry spot would be the right one out of so many scattered around for one to take advantage of; at least, it must not be the one that would lead one astray or cause one to lose balance and fall into the swamps around. Even worse, the dry elevated and apparently safe spots could often turn out to be nothing but natural traps made of hidden swamps underneath them. In fact, once slipped in the swamp, one would probably stay bogged down there for a good while unless or until, with a stroke of luck, one could finally manage to get out of it before getting too deep into it. Therefore, these dry spots where one could safely land upon would undoubtedly be as useful as the indispensable stepstones but at the same time, they could often also become treacherously misleading for simply even trying to step onto them. In the text of wetland of The Waste Land, these “spots” or “stepstones” are certainly made of at least over 100 immediately recognizable literary references and allusions along with the innumerous hidden ones; their presence makes The Waste Land become such a text of wetland at once manageable and risky to wade through. As will be discussed in the following sections of the preface’s as in the subsequent chapters, the yet-to-be-recognized allusions as hidden “stepstones” or deceptive traps would often prove as much indispensable and treacherous as the immediately recognizable ones in ways so obviously scattered around swamps and across the wetland. Reading The

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Waste Land therefore would be indeed like waging slowly across the wetland in this way. To make every step forward count, one must deal with not only the swamps but also the “stepstones.” These indispensable “stepstones”functioning literary references and allusions are really so innumerous; they could be originally intended by the author or be simply inherent in the text itself but are brought into life in ways as much vividly from the text as from the readers as their evoked contributing responses. These “extra” references or allusions would certainly add, a posteriori, so many additional “unpremeditated, accidental” perspectives to make the text of The Waste Land further “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” through the process of reading, ad infinitum. However, regardless of how useful as it might be in illuminating such major reading experiences as regards The Waste Land and Four Quartets, the analogy also suggests its own limit, which, nonetheless, quite ironically, further reveals in this way the intricate nature of The Waste Land as poetry.20 In fact, as will be further discussed in detail in the following chapters, once we know, for instance, how to focus on all these often so nonsensical sounding allusions in the poem not merely for verbal message of despair or “image of destruction,” such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down,” be it in English or in foreign tongues, but instead appropriately for the “intermediary sensation”-arousing or “auditory imagination”-evoking sounds and rhythms alive with the sound messages inherent in the verbal music, we would instantly find how The Waste Land could flow as much fluidly as Four Quartets. Indeed, as will be further discussed in the following sections and chapters, once we know how to shift attention adequately to the meaningful flows of sounds instead of staying so habitually focused on verbal messages and ideas, we would then even find, from behind such a “clear” verbal message of despair and such a conspicuous “image of destruction,” that is, the lullaby of the falling London Bridge, the remarkably soul-caressing and lifeaffirming simple sounds and rhythms that still remain so familiar and dear to us since our infant or even our fetus stage; we would even find, so to speak, the sounds and rhythms as compatible as with those of our mothers’ heartbeats that always echo or mean so much to us as a simple and yet forever so steadily heart-assuring message of hope itself. As will be further discussed in the following chapters, this scenario would be particularly true especially when we could come to realize how many different “original” versions there would be in singing meaningfully, with affection, the nonsensical lullaby of London Bridge, let alone so many jazz-like “improvised” ones. Likewise, in this regard, how many there would also be the varying versions of saying “I love you” with varying intonations, patterns of pauses, and stresses? No doubt, there are always so many ways of saying “I love you” including body language, facial expression, and even silence. Verbally,

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however, the actual meaning of the expression could vary significantly contingent upon which and how one of the three words of the expression receives a stress. As with a trisyllabic metric foot of dactyl (¯ ˘ ˘ ), if the word “I” is stressed, one of the possible meanings of the expression could sound like how “no one else in the world actually loves you but I.” When the verb “love” becomes stressed as with another trisyllabic foot of amphibrach (˘ ¯ ˘), it could then possibly mean that “I do not hate you but actually love you.” When a stress falls on the last word “you” as of an anapest (˘ ˘ ¯), it could then mean how “I love no one else but you alone in the world.”21 Therefore, it is quite possible to suggest how the prosodically significant subtleties or variations could likewise emerge from within the syntactic-prosodic structure as through readers’ spatiotemporal free imagination.22 In short, whichever way as we may choose to read it, reading The Waste Land certainly relies upon such an immeasurably meaning-rich text as deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies with an inexhaustible supply of literary allusions and infinite space for us to search and explore for the meaning of life through this particular context in so many ways the poem represents. Whether into or from such a context, there could be so much of meaning and beauty to be timely germinated to make the text of The Waste Land truly poetry, that is, as truly “rhythmical creation of [meaningful beauty.”23 This experience with such a context would be particularly the case when readers are valued by Eliot as his own “mon frère” as so indicated with a reference to Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal for a “writerly” process of reading, which is so characteristic of The Waste Land, especially in ways as Roland Barthes himself would so suggest here as in The Pleasure of the Text. Furthermore, with a text so uniquely reminiscent of such a wetland of “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies,” The Waste Land indeed opens up a remarkably rich space for further exploration with further challenges, which could even involve this simple tactic to interpret such an easily recognizable allusion as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” Should it indeed be interpreted, as mentioned above, as a conspicuous visual “image of destruction” and despair or as a valid sound message that ironically suggests hope with its “intermediary sensation”-arousing or “auditory imagination”-evoking and lullaby sounding tune and rhythms in ways always so heart-soothingly familiar to us all even since our childhood? Whichever way to go, how could it be possible for us to know whether, how, or how much, if at all, the way we choose to read would be in line with a supposedly authorial intention, not merely as an involuntary “by-product” of the text through the agency of ourselves as readers, that is, even as Eliot’s valued and actively participatory “mon frère[s]”? In such immeasurably rich text, so hard would it also be for us to capture alive the “primitive wisdom”-conveying and life-affirming “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” of

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poetry truly as “the dictionary of the soul” from so many different allusions as from across so many different intricate sources beyond, behind, beneath, and between all the usual boundaries of genres, cultures, and standards of value assessment. These allusions would so often act, for instance, in so many different meaninglessly meaningful ways as the repetitively life-affirming melodies of the performative nonsenses, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” Therefore, to benefit as much as we can from the immeasurably rich text of The Waste Land and, at the same time, to avoid the danger to be bogged down into the swamps of its “allusiveness,” which, as Gareth Reeves points out, “has, notoriously, encouraged exegesis rather than criticism,” the strategy of island-hopping or flowing with rhythmic intonation of sounds is also, as Reeves so acutely observes, “necessary to begin at the very beginning and work [our] way to the end” because this is the way “to hear what the poem is up to.”24 Besides, even “if the present reading goes too far the other way, [our] excuse [would also be] that [we] wish to help correct the balance.”25 THE MESSAGE OF HOPE INHERENT IN SOUNDS AS LIFE-SUBSTANTIATING ECHOES OF VOID OF CHAOS Be it of an apocalyptic scene of our world or of a tenacious message of hope inherent in the scenes of destruction and despair or in everything that Eliot depicts and deplores particularly the ways he does it, whichever approach we may take for whatever message we try to get out of The Waste Land, the first hurdle we must go through, however, is the text itself. More than anything else, the text indeed still quite resembles an immense or virtually immeasurable void of infinite and yet to be further sorted out chaos or matrix of would-be meanings. In this regard, the poem would undoubtedly often appear as nothing else but an immeasurable void of everything so chaotically thrown in but deprived of “meaning,” especially for those whose literary approach to the text of The Waste Land may not be as adequately nuanced enough as necessary; it would, in other words, often appear as such a void of utmost chaos so devoid of meaning in ways as our world really or allegedly was before the divine creation at least according to all the creation narratives that we are so familiar with. The narratives, for instance, could run from Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Upanishads to Chinese creation mythology, such as the esteemed Chinese mythological hero Pangu (盤古), who made the heavens and earth out of chaos and void (hundun 混沌). This creation narrative should even include, among many others, such cruelly fun anecdotes on the bisection of humanity by Zeus for the arrogance and strengths that humans once revealed in rivaling Zeus and the Olympic gods

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and goddesses, as it is so narrated in “Symposium” of Plato’s Dialogue. Creation therefore certainly also indicates such a collaborative verbally coordinated performative action as “And God said, ‘Let there be . . .’ And it was so . . . ‘Let us make man in our images . . . according to its kind’” to sort out everything in a meaning-asserting, value-establishing, and hierarchically dichromatic pigeonholing way or order by means of categorization or compartmentalization. This fundamental way of sorting things out has indeed been so deeply entrenched in our psyches even to become so naturally our surreptitiously paradigmatized cognitive predisposition toward prioritizing meaning over sound, “meaningful” content words over “meaningless” function words, the familiar over the strange, substance over void, clarity over ambiguity, “sense”-making over “nonsense”-fabricating, and so on. Void could, in this regard, also naturally indicate our cognitive, culturally specific, and collective “innate” blind spots inherent in our preferences. Indeed, in this regard, “the possibility of describing the world even by means of Newtonian mechanics,” as Wittgenstein sees it, “tells us nothing about the world; but what does tell us something about it is the precise way in which it is possible to describe it by these means” or “the fact that it can be described more simply with one system of mechanics than with another.”26 Therefore, “mechanics,” for Wittgenstein, is only “an attempt to construct according to a single plan all the true propositions that we need for the description of the world,” even though “the laws of physics, with all their logical apparatus, still speak, however indirectly, about the objects of the world.”27 Therefore, if this is the case with Newtonian mechanics, however rigorously “scientific” as it is, how could anything else not ultimately appear as nothing more than a mere matter of choice for an “optional” or “simpler” plan? Whatever happens to be thus chosen consequently is not just about the reality itself but indeed rather also about our mental picture of reality.28 In this regard, even the Newtonian mechanics, in other words, could ultimately resemble as much as a “picture” that pictures a picture of reality, the way we choose to see it—the way of an opaque mirror that reflects not only an ambiguous image of reality with variable options to see it but also our actual capacity and motivation to see or to perceive it. However, for exactly the same reason, void could also be thus equally appreciated as such actual but often overlooked “deeply interpenetrated mind-enriching living cultural ecologies” in every possible level from philosophy to linguistics in ways as the still infinitely “chaotic” but “fresh” literary “virgin soil” the way The Waste Land itself so represents. In the live context of The Waste Land as special void of such immense or immeasurably meaningful chaos, with which despair and hope remain as much inseparable “twin” as nonsense and meaning literally are. Also, in this live context,

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despair could often appear so readily reversible with hope inasmuch the same way as nonsense and meaning. This simultaneously text-enlivened and text-enlivening reversibility as regards despair and hope consequently makes meaning in the live context of The Waste Land far beyond what could only be measured or made sense of through our commonsensical understanding as by means of what Wittgenstein so emphatically defines as the inviolable rules of our “common language,” which is primarily confined to the given paradigms set up for our “common” use for general cognition. Nonetheless, as will be discussed further in the following sections and chapters, in the immeasurably rich void of chaos in ways as the text of The Waste Land so represents, the sheer nonsensical expressions, as so often judged by the strict rules of our “common language” or in terms of our readily applicable common sense, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down” and the nonsensical weialala chanting from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung, could instead become truly meaningful expressions of hope through every phoneme or sound that would make the meaningfully performative life-affirming “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” of whatever nonsensical or meaningless allusions of despair. Therefore, with the tenaciously genuine voices of poetry as “the first language” of humanity, this sound of despair, along with any “image of destruction” in its company, that is, “London Bridge is falling down,” would instantly become the sound of hope. Echoing in the forms of poetic allusions and invoking “primitive wisdom”-conveying and forever life-affirming “intermediary sensation,” this instantly sound of despair turned sound of hope would then truly become the sound of poetry, which stands for, as in Herder’s term, “eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie,” that is, “A Dictionary of the Soul, at once mythology and the wondrous epic of the actions and voices of all being,”29 in ways so vividly reminiscent of the fundamental crucible of indestructible humanity. With the sound and voice of poetry as the “first language” of humanity so understood as deeply inherent in the performative nonsenses necessary for “a stable mythopoeia for the passion and the mind,” we would certainly wonder in ways as much as Herder does as to what more could be expected of The Waste Land as “what more [could there be expected of] poetry?”30 Indeed, even only with all these “primitive wisdom”-invoking “intermediary sensation” as the soul-nourishing sounds or auditory “guides,” we would still be able to navigate through the text of The Waste Land for “meaning” in ways otherwise impossible, however nonsensical sounding as all these pivotal but hard-to-decode allusions would initially be, especially when judged as nowadays in terms of the rules of a grammar book. We would still be able to wade through the swamps of allusions that make up the bulk of the vast wetland of The Waste Land as text, regardless of how immeasurably chaotic or treacherous as the text itself would possibly be; we would still be able, in other words,

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to capture from within the text of The Waste Land as much nuanced “intermediary sensation” as the myriads of nuanced private sensations of “pains” and “color,” which, according to Wittgenstein, along with Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, is utterly untranslatable for any conceptual understanding by sheer means of our common natural language, which is so specifically designed for its “common” usage. Indeed, “designed” so specifically for its common usage, our common language would therefore not be exactly fit for any expression of the truly or infinitely nuanced private/personal feelings as “felt,” such as toothache, especially in terms of its common vocabulary, regular parts of speech, and general syntax.31 The subtle but vital sense-assuring and life-confirming “intermediary sensation” would also be otherwise utterly incommunicable if merely by means of any lexically or categorically defined or definable meanings or “parts of speech” of our “common language”; one must also, in other words, take it adequately into consideration the impacts of sound and rhythm of words as what makes poetry not only the quintessentially primordial language of humanity but also truly the “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty.” Therefore, in the light of such understanding of the infinitely meaning-rich void as a special context that makes infinitely nuanced echoes of poetry, regardless of how challenging as the text of The Waste Land would possibly be, it should still be likely handled. With sound and rhythm of life and poetry understood in this way, void then certainly stands up for anything as essential and yet as equally invisible as air. The otherwise invisible air would then become as much sensibly visible or be sensitively turned into the awe-strikingly concentrated currents of air known as “hurricanes” and “tornadoes”; it could certainly also be grasped in the same way as the graceful “breath of Autumn’s being” dancing with the falling leaves as in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The Ode to the West Wind.” So would void be perceived in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets through “the form” or “the pattern” of “intermediary sensation” that can make words and music stand, like a Chinese jar, in its perpetual still motion. Would not void likewise also be understood as equally powerful in delivering the tenacious message of hope to the readers sensitive enough as “mon frère” to capture it in the context of The Waste Land even from beneath, behind, and between the seemingly forever lingering sounds and echoes of despair? In this live context as the text of The Waste Land so represents, void could certainly also be adequately grasped as the “langue” of the deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” accessible only by means of each live case of “parole” however diverse or discrete as each would possibly be. This “langue” of void would be certainly surmised at by means of each specific “parole” in ways as each discrete allusion would be in relation the text of The Waste Land as the text of The Waste Land itself would be in relation with the overall literary tradition of both past and present

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across cultures that make up “langue” as the collage of the “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” as “negative capability.” This “langue” and “parole” relationship would probably could also thus be made sense of, as Wittgenstein would suggest at this moment, in ways as “a visible section of rails [that] invisibly laid to infinity” and “infinitely long rails [that] correspond to the unlimited application of a rule.”32 Indeed, with Wittgenstein as the “unpremeditated, accidental philosopher” here in the context for timely illumination, the intricate nature of The Waste Land could then be further understood in terms of “langue” and “parole” in ways as Saussure himself would so chime in as well, also suggestively with a message of hope. Indeed, however possibly it could be as profound as the immeasurable void of chaos, The Waste Land would still be appropriately made sense of because ultimately, if conceived as compatible as with “langue,” it could be equally perceived as “a self-contained whole and a principle of classification” as “langue.”33 While the text of The Waste Land could certainly be understood as compatible as “langue” when the feature of “a self-contained whole and a principle of classification” is to be emphasized, it could equally be made sense of as “parole,” no matter how possibly, like “parole,” it could be as “many-sided and heterogenous, straddling several areas simultaneously—physical, physiological”; as “parole,” the text of The Waste Land could certainly so simultaneously “belongs both to the individual and to the society” and, consequently, “we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity.”34 With reference to Saussure’s in addition to Wittgenstein’s conception of language in this way, I also try “to make a decidedly non-structuralist argument” as a means to express my own “double-barreled antipathy toward” both the tendency for excessive exegesis in line with a supposed authorial intention at the expense of actual critical engagement with the text itself and the utterly unrestrained “writerly” reading. I make the effort literally in ways as Roger Ames does with his “double-barreled antipathy toward both cultural relativism and cultural incommensurability” by “borrow[ing] and adapt[ing] the Saussurian structuralist distinction between langue (universal and systematic linguistic structures and rules governing all languages) and parole (diverse and open-ended speech acts in any of our natural languages).”35 Likewise, would it not be equally possible for a void to be understood in terms of the Hebraic narrative tradition, which would, as Erick Auerbach so emphasizes, often so at once awe-strikingly and mind-bogglingly emerge as “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena” from behind, beneath, and between the “intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactic culture” of a “sense-bewitching” Homeric tradition?36 With this Homeric tradition, the Hebraic tradition often finds itself locked in a simultaneously conflicting and complementary relationship in ways so reminiscent of what C. G. Jung refers to in terms of the drastic

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difference or disparity between the first and second part of Goethe’s Faust. The second part, as Jung so points out, could occur as if, so all of a sudden, “foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos—a crimen laesae majestatis humanae,” which, as in Nietzsche’s words, “bursts asunder our human standards of value and of aesthetic form.”37 VOID AS MATRIX OF SUBSTANCE AND PATTERN: THE ILLUMINATING VIEWS FROM ACROSS CULTURES With void appropriately understood at least as such “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” in ways so vividly indicative of the live context of The Waste Land, what often appears hopelessly and helplessly as our irrevocable destiny would then become readily revocable; we humans, as Goethe so deplores in Pandora, often become so doomed or “[d]estined, to see the illuminated, not the light.” Even so, there are still more than enough light there around and ahead as at once inside and outside ourselves for us to see, such as the illuminating light of void, only if we know or become so enlightened to know how to see it. Could we not see how, according to Laozi, “We join spokes together in a wheel, / but it is the center hole / that males the wagon move / We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside / that holds whatever we want / We hammer wood for a house, / but it is the inner space / that makes it livable / We work with being / but nonbeing is what we use.”38 Undoubtedly, the image of the void could therefore also be naturally perceived in terms of the image of “womb” even in ways as Nicodemus so literally refers to when he questions the possibility for a person to be born again (John 3:4).39 Likewise, with the concept of “womb” suggested with reference to Dao in the image of a deep valley in terms of all its infinite power of receptivity, vastness, and vacancy, is it not also thus said in both the sixth and fifteenth chapters of Daodejing how “Great Mother” is as “empty but inexhaustible” in “giv[ing] birth to infinite worlds”? Furthermore, this is undoubtedly also what Confucius argues for in the third chapter of The Analects with one crucial sentence “when painting leave plain space as background” (繪事後素 huìshì hòusù). Such blank or plain space is indeed the void so indispensable as the holistic sensemaking “atmosphere” that must, as in Wittgenstein’s words, “accompany[ ] the word . . . into every kind of application”40 for whatever human experiences that might emerge in the form of awe-striking Hebraic vision from behind, beneath, and between the “sensebewitching” Homeric viewpoint; the impact of void would thus probably be as shocking as the “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena” or “the

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disturbing vision of monstrous and meaningless happenings that in every way exceed the grasp of human feeling and comprehension,” as in the second part of Goethe’s Faust.41 This is exactly also why in the forty-first chapter of Daodejing, the void also stands for the vital element that for Laozi truly makes “great music,” which is as much “barely audible” (大音希聲 dà yīn xī sheng) as Keats’s unheard melodies, which “are sweeter” than those heard ones. So is it also why for Eliot “music heard so deeply / That it is not heard at all” (FQ III, v). Likewise, is it not also true that everything that we often value so much, such as the Grecian urn in Keats’s poem or the Chinese jar as in Four Quartets, is so ironically not really all that we can see, which supposedly makes everything we see valuable but it is rather the void, the very nothingness, which we do not even see that brings value to everything we can see? Indeed, as a simple truth “known” to all the jar makers, be they Chinese or Grecian, what makes a jar a jar is the void or simply the “beautiful” empty space inside the jar, regardless of whatever culturally distinctive patterns and palpable shapes outside on the surface or the actual quality of materials used in making a jar. Historically, for the poor ancient Greek artisans or urnmakers, as we all know, what truly matters with them, first and foremost, is not how the urns “look” but, rather, how much the urns could contain to their maximum “capacity.” This is exactly what leads Adolf Loos to his emphatic statements of the overlooked pivotal facts, which would apparently “cut many an idealist to the quick.”42 Regardless, contrary as to what is commonly believed nowadays and as long as “these magnificent Greek vases” are concerned,” the awe-strikingly exquisite beauty of Grecian vases, in fact, as Loos points out, attribute not at all to “their perfect forms that seem created solely to tell of the Greek people’s desire for beauty” but “merely to necessity.”43 For, as a matter of fact, “[t]he feet, the body, the handles, the size of the mouth” of all Grecian vases’ are all, as Loos rightly emphasizes, “dictated only by function” and, consequently, “that would mean that these vases are ultimately just practical!”44 Then “how [could it be that] we always thought they were beautiful?”45 It is simply because, as Loos further explains, “we have always been taught: practicality excludes beauty.”46 For the Greek vase-makers, however, “they created only that which was practical, without concerning themselves in the least with that which was beautiful, without worrying about complying with an aesthetic imperative.”47 As a result, “[w]hen an object was made so practical that it could not be made any more practical,” the Greek vase-makers, emphasizes Loos, “then . . . call it beautiful. Subsequent peoples call it beautiful as well, and we too say: these vases are beautiful.”48 Therefore, the meanings of The Waste Land could be so illuminated in terms of so many visioncorrecting lights of the void from within itself as from without. In this way,

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once again, there would not be such a sad case as regards how we might be so doomed or “[d]estined, to see the illuminated, not the light.” MESSAGE OF HOPE INHERENT IN SOUNDS OF DESPAIR With void understood in this way, it would therefore not be so hard, if not utterly impossible, to read the message of hope in the text as it is so inherent in every despairing scene that Eliot depicts and deplores especially in terms of each specific way he does it in accordance with and/or in spite of his own intention. With its compatible narrative tendency, The Waste Land certainly also brings the utmost complexity of humanity to an understanding with “complete simplicity” (FQ V, v) valuing the “humility of words” (FQ II, ii) as the ultimate version of “humility of wisdom” in the end. This tendency toward “complete simplicity” culminates in Four Quartets with the recognition of “the fire and the rose are one” (FQ V v), as a matter of fact, literally starts with or remains inherent in the intricate text of The Waste Land. What becomes even further apparent is the common message that celebrates the tenacious power of hope. This is the power that cannot be rationalized for its understanding but is really there anywhere in the text even of places least imaginable, such as life sprouting from the corpse buried deep underneath the enriched soils of the garden or the “da, da, da” dry empty sounding thunderclaps that bring no raindrops but the definitive message of hope, a hope of “the better yet to come.”49 Indeed, so reflective of the tenacious power of hope, this message of hope, which could even be so delivered through the thumping sounds of thunderclaps are inherent as much in the centuries-old simple life-affirming sounds and rhythms Da, Da, Da in all the Indo-European languages as in the lines of “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shanti shantih” (WL V, iv) from the Upanishads.50 This tenacious message of hope so inherent in the primitive and simple life-affirming sounds and rhythms is confirmed as much by Johann Gottfried von Herder in Treatise on the Origin of Language as by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams; it is particularly the case especially in terms of Freud’s exemplary reference to the sound of Da often as the first sound, word, or syllable an infant utters. The message of hope is even inherent in humanity’s tenacious but often not so fruitful rationalist endeavor in trying to grasp, with whatever modernist approaches available, the fragmented modern world, which indeed appears more and more like the forever “ungraspable phantom” of life particularly as regards the ultimate destiny of humanity as a whole. This message of hope, so hard to be rationalized for conceptual understanding but truly as tenaciously real even as “the thing with feathers,”

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does not simply fly away like a “deceiving elf” but could instead occasion a “leap of faith” in ways as Kierkegaard would so suggest here as in Either/ Or.51 Certainly, as will be discussed in detail in the following chapters, this tenacious power of hope often appears to be so steadily conveyed and confirmed not only in meaning but also in sounds until everything culminates so smoothly in this way in the last section of The Waste Land with all the descriptions become more and more pivoted upon or around the simple patterns of sounds; the patterns literally sustain the major verbal structure and facilitate the performative and participatory function of the poetic language in ways so characteristic of The Waste Land. However often overlooked, this pivotal pattern of sounds does fortunately appear so accurately spotted from time to time as invaluable as “virtuoso mastery of verbal music.”52 Often mediated by the most commonplace and conveniently repeatable content words and functions particularly through those monosyllabic ones, such as “water” and “rock”; with these words sustaining the coherence and fluidity of the poem in the form of resonant verbal patterns, the poem, as a result, not only flows naturally from inside out but also often casts such a mesmerizing impact on readers. The mesmerizing impact would often be as much irresistible as for us to catch instantly the simple but tenacious life-affirming message of hope, which could be so deeply inherent in various meaningfully meaningless simple lullabies or nursery rhymes, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” The simple, as if always so endlessly recurring, lullaby however could indeed be as rhythmically life-affirming as the simple sounds of our mothers’ soul-soothing heartbeats. These are definitely the simple sounds of heartbeats that all sound so familiar to us even when we were still all nestling in our mothers’ warm arms as infants or in their caressing wombs as fetuses waiting to be born while listening to the same life-affirming sounds or rhythms. We find the sounds and rhythms all echoing so mind-refreshingly live now in the text of The Waste Land. Undoubtedly, on the one hand, The Waste Land could be reasonably read as a poem of despair especially when it ends with “the atmosphere [which] is colored for more strongly by the image of destruction ‘London Bridge is falling down falling down,’ and by the scene of attempting to shore up the ruins by repeating words of comfort and strengthening of the spirit which may help [the reader] but they are in foreign tongues, not translated into his own inner experiences and so become part of himself.”53 On the other hand, everything, however otherwise “not translated” or even not translatable, could certainly indeed be so serendipitously “translated into his own inner experiences and so become part of himself,” simply contingent upon how one reads it; everything, in other words, could still be so undoubtedly turned into our own inner experiences through the simple life-affirming sound message inherent in our native tongues. No doubt, be it in English or

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in foreign tongues, as long as it is in our “intermediary sensation”-arousing or “auditory imagination”-evoking native tongues, the sound message of hope would certainly echo with its rhythmic simple life-affirming beats however often the importance of such crucial but untranslatable messages would be habitually underestimated or simply overlooked because of our paradigmatically set preference for clear and translatable, even if muted, verbal images and ideas. The interpretation of The Waste Land therefore depends very much upon whether or how the reader could resonate with the repetitive life-affirming and soul-soothing heartbeats-like sounds and rhythms of lullabies that echo so distinctly from behind the supposedly conspicuous “image of destruction” and idea of despair in ways as the lullaby of falling London Bridge may so suggest. This is why we should learn how to keep our ears open as much as our hearts utterly unobstructed thereby “to hear what the poem is up to”54 by following the “storyline of the soul,” which would be available nowhere else but in the nuances of intonation, moods-suggesting patterns of recurring rhythms, the subtle modulation of the sound of poetry as the “dictionary of the soul” or even as the “prosody of hearts and minds of humanity,” as a whole, along the same line of the thought. As will be discussed further in the following chapters, the heart-soothing and memories recalling tunes and rhythms in the live context of The Waste Land would certainly often sound so familiar to us all even as we were still mere fetuses in such a way that they could instantly turn the “image of destruction” into a vehicle as if created solely for the purpose to reaffirm the message of hope through our awakened “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination.” All therefore, in other words, is so much contingent upon whether or how we would be able to take the sounds adequately into consideration as the irreplaceable sensemaking factors the ways “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” is. After all, is it not as true as A. David Moody so asks that “the profound and original life of the poetry, which is the life of feeling, is all in its music”?55 With this understanding, would we still, as Moody may also thus ask, so casually as usual, “neglect [or] miss the essential action” of life, per se, which could be as vividly in action as in the form of “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination?”56 With these crucial auditory and musical qualities appropriately taken into consideration, even the otherwise most “nonsensical” and “foreign” allusions could then also become so meaninglessly meaningful especially in terms of the last five juxtaposed ones that end the poem of The Waste Land in English, Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit, which certainly includes the “meaningless” lullaby “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” In this regard, “linguistic alienation in The Waste Land,” indeed, as Gareth Reeves points out, “goes hand in hand with linguistic attraction: we are fascinated by what sounds

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strange” as we are fascinated with what sounds familiar;57 it is therefore certainly a “paradox,” according to Reeves, as regards how “in their utter foreignness, at once alienating and compelling, lies their significance”;58 it should then by no means at all be surprising for us, also according to Reeves, even to feel, with our awakened “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination,” how “salvation implies another language . . . And yet the words are not entirely foreign” because, as we all know, “Sanskrit is thought to be the oldest Indo-European language, and is therefore the root of all the languages in the poem.”59 Therefore, as Reeves further suggests, we would then even be so serendipitously awakened to feel how “as DA is the root of the three commands”;60 we would be so thrilled, in other words, to feel how, with “the languages [that] scatter, to be gathered in the final words,” the text of The Waste Land miraculously “reaches back to a pre-lapsarian condition before the dispersal intonation of languages; and Sanskrit is as metaphor of a primitive, wise and single speech.”61 Certainly, it is also in this way that all the seemingly nonsensical and foreign voices that we capture from the allusions also reveal another most pivotal nature of our common natural language explored in The Waste Land, that is, its performative function, which still often remains quite unnoticeable behind, beneath, and between our common natural language’s most noticeable narrative and descriptive features. Those variably performative voices in The Waste Land, indeed, so often do their most theatrical work through our awakened “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination,” which also simultaneously awakens in turns the text that awakens it to the benefit of the one single-protagonist who performs his various roles from behind so many masks made of so many different theatrical voices. Undoubtedly, “all the voices in the poem,” as Calvin Bedient so argues, “are the performances of a single-protagonist—not Tiresias but a nameless stand-in for Eliot himself—performances, indeed, of a distinctly theatrical kind.”62 Furthermore, as Jewel S. Brooker and Joseph Bentley argue, the message of hope also quite performatively reveals itself in the further awakening of self-consciousness through suffering, which occurs in “The final section of The Waste Land, ‘What the Thunder Said’, [which] enacts an emergence from extinction into a renewal of suffering—The attempt to ‘escape downward’ is over and for all”; in its place, “contribut[ing] an exhilarating affirmation,”63 there appears “the rebirth of conscious anguish and desperate searches for ways of interpreting the universe, however painful and insufficient they are.”64 This message of hope, also as Brooker and Bentley see it, even appears so acted out in the form of self-conscious revolt or “dethronement of Locke and Descartes,” with which “philosophers came to see that the subject and object were connected in a systematic relationship and that mind and matter were aspects of a single world.”65 No doubt, as it is so indicated in The Waste Land

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especially through the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural literary approaches the book adopts, “most of the makers of the twentieth-century mind, figures such as Freud, Heisenberg, Picasso, Joyce, and Eliot, have in common an about-face on the subject-object question and the mind-matter question” and “they all reject the dualism that arbitrarily and irreversibly splits the world into pieces.”66 However, “this rejection of dualism and corresponding reach for monism are of the essence in understanding the revolutionary nature of twentieth-century science and art.”67 In fact, exactly as it is so indicated, the message of hope is still there inherent in the “conscious anguish and desperate searches for ways of interpreting the universe” along with the self-conscious “rejection of dualism and corresponding reach for monism,” even if it could also be merely an irreversible stage of transition or “a [performative] rite of passage” for the dying and death before the ultimate renewal of life and humanity, as Moody thus sees it. Indeed, “if from Ritual to Romance does elucidate [The Waste Land],” it is, as Moody so puts it, “less by glossing allusions, than by reminding us what kind of a poem it would be: a way passing through death to a new life.”68 The Waste Land, in other words, is not written “for the living” but rather, as quite performatively “a rite de passage” so literally “for the dying and the dead,”69 because “there is no impulse towards a renewal of human love, and no energy is generated for that”;70 in the labyrinthine world or limbo of The Waste Land, there is “in short, [simply] the rite of Eliot’s Saint Narcissus.”71 Even so, the message of hope is still there inherent in the simple fact in ways as The Waste Land itself so indicates, that is, how “to act out love’s negative may be indeed a necessary and inescapable phase, especially in a world that does not live by love,” and therefore “in such a world as ours to save even oneself takes courage, even heroism.”72 Undoubtedly, “Eliot’s poetry shows him to have had enough [action] for that” even if the “heroism of The Waste Land is of the kind which would end the human world, not give new life to it.”73 MESSAGE OF HOPE IN TEXT-ENLIVENING TRIVIAL LIFE-AFFIRMING SOUND Whichever way The Waste Land could be thus read for whatever message of hope inherent therein, the innumerous “intermediary sensation”-awakening or “auditory imagination”-arousing trivial sounds of words could always be primarily where the treasury of hope remains hidden. There are certainly as many as such hidden performative life-affirming sounds as imaginable; they all appear echoing as ironically in silence as “sweeter, unheard melody” in the text of The Waste Land, which would often seem in this regard as if composed only of the lines that supposedly reflect, as intended, nothing else but sounds and scenes of despair. These lines of “despair” would then consequently be

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often so readily taken for granted as much as self-evident even just at the first sight, such as the simple lines “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains / Which are mountains of rock without water” (WL V, ii). Indeed, as to be further analyzed in detail, when inspected closer from a different perspective, the overall meaning of this passage appears as if only created for a mesmerizing moment of relaxation, not for the depiction of scenes of desolation; it seems to invite us to let go whatever initial concerns we might have about how to capture the meaning from the depressing and nonsensical scenario only to dance to the verbal music or to “rock ‘n’ roll” with “rock” and “road”; it wants us to enjoy, however momentarily, the very process or moment of “the rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” the way poetry so truly or so performatively is. Therefore, in the live verbal context of The Waste Land, often so contrary to the desolate scene as the passage so literally depicts, the sounds of this pair of keywords “water” and “rock” also seem to engage intimately with each other in a jingling chiastic pattern of wordplay, which often sounds so defiantly playful especially when they resonate with “drip drop” in the line, that is, “But sound of water over a rock . . . Drip drop drip drop . . ./But there is no water” (WL V, ii). In the live verbal context, even what appears otherwise purely normal use of the utmost commonplace and “meaningless” function words, such as the repetitive occurrence of the definite article “the” along with the occasional appearance of conjunction “and” and the indefinite article “a” would all seem to suggest in a minutely coordinated pattern anything but a pessimistic view of life. The sound pattern instead even seem to betray a subtle detail-caring, life-asserting, and reality-confirming impact of itemization that simultaneously sustains and is sustained by a spirit of upbeat optimism in ways as discussed in the following chapters, particularly chapter 1 after a brief outline here in the preface. Indeed, with the lines becoming so resonantly interlocked with one another through such common phonemic gens sharing itemizable common words led by “water,” “rock,” and “mountain,” the lines would often even sound as much mischievously playful and defiantly sarcastic as “the image of destruction” of “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” All therefore would be very much contingent upon how we read them, while trying to make sense of a rhythmically resonating verbal string or phonemic network that makes sounds so meaningfully contrapuntal in ways so suggestive of the varying moods. This attention to the meaning-indicating verbal music should also be reason enough for Eliot to suggest how to read his poetry, such as The Hollow Men. While “[r]eferring to section five of ‘The Hollow Men,’” he suggested, for instance, how “the first and the last quatrains should be spoken very rapidly, without punctuation in a flat monotonous voice, rather like children chanting a counting-out game” and how “[t]he intermediate

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part, on the other hand, should be spoken slowly although also without too much expression, but more like the recitation of a litany.”74 Certainly, one of such suggested possible ways of reading could only lead to theoretically myriad or simply infinite other possible ways of reading the same poem from time to time pragmatically of both pragmatics and pragmatism in the sense. Undoubtedly, varying with who the reader is, when, where, with whom, in what mood, for what specific purpose, under what specific circumstances, this poem could be read in drastically different but equally valid ways as Wittgenstein would so indicate with the duck-rabbit image of the same picture from Joseph Jastrow’s Fact and Fable in Psychology. In the picture, as will be discussed later, even if, as Wittgenstein so emphasizes, we can only see at the first sight a duck or a rabbit, the same picture could still be as validly perceived as both simply contingent upon an adjusted viewpoint, perspective, or consciousness.75 Therefore, with a humorous and lighthearted and also a subtle tint of sarcasm and defiance so suggested in the lines, everything in the text particularly around this part would then seem to move so smoothly in the resonant sounds of harmony and spirit of optimism in ways so reminiscent of the utterly meaninglessly meaningful tunes of the life-assuring and soul-caressing tones of the nonsensical lullaby of “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” Many simple and soothing tones of the nonsensical chanting in The Waste Land from the lullaby of falling London Bridge to chorus of Weialala in Wagner’s Götterdämmerung would all appear to suggest so timely the message of hope through these minutely tuned alternative or contrapuntal notes. Interplaying in an infinitely repetitive pattern, these notes would seem to go on and on as if indefinitely in prayer until the eventual arrival of the best yet to come that they so pray for or invoke by means of praying. Clearly, these resonantly repetitive and recurring tones would all occur in this regard to suggest or even invoke the message of hope at the critical moment as the subtle life-affirming verbal music, which often plays around as if so deliberately for irony at once upon and against the scenes and sense of despair so commonly or so readily taken for granted. As the last line of the last part of the poem may so indicate, there would even be such a particular case as regards how even the utterly untranslatable “primitive wisdom”-conveying “intermediary sensation” from the sounds “Da, Da, Da” of the loud sterile thunderclaps that bring no raindrops would nonetheless also bring us a ray of hope, however despairing as the scenario itself may so appear in reality. Indeed, the sound message of hope often seems to run in this way contrary to the supposedly primary scenes and senses of hopeless desolation, debauchery, and despair, which would often so take us immediately as readers upon our initial encounter with the poem. Therefore, when we realize how often the text would run in ways so contrary to our initial impression of it as another

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such self-acknowledged utmost “blasphemous” poem of despair in addition to The Hollow Men,76 we would then even come to wonder whether all the scenes of hopelessness are even so depicted, after all, merely as the expedient vehicles to bring out these sound messages of hope inherent in them, be it as intended or as “unpremeditated, accidental.”77 With the message of hope understood in this way as remaining so tenaciously hidden but alive behind, beneath, between, or even beyond the message of despair, The Waste Land indeed becomes a wasteland of hope. Does not the message of hope therefore remain, in other words, so inseparable from the message of despair as the two sides that make the coin of our life? Even if possibly as such a “thing with feathers” in ways as Emily Dickenson so puts it, would not the message of hope be as readily detectable as Dao often in places as least noticeable or most unthinkable as “stony rubbish” or even as utmost ignoble as “piss and shit,” as Zhuangzi so indicates in his eponymous book while referring to the tenacious ubiquity of Dao, which is, indeed, as elusive, or even illusive, and yet, at the same time, so sustentative and tenacious as Hope?78 THE MESSAGE OF HOPE IN THE LEAST NOTICEABLE “STONY RUBBISH” IN WORDS These interlocking and interplaying lines as mentioned above therefore could certainly often sound a little meaningfully playful with the jingling tones of carefree defiance and disdain toward feelings of hopelessness or despair. The lines that seem to jingle subtly in this way would probably also seem to tease mildly anyone who may read The Waste Land a little too straightforwardly as if the poem carried nothing else but a prevailing pessimistic motif of “swan songs.”79 These lines seem to remind us with a light-hearted mood that however miserable life could possibly be, there is still the undying human spirit that would cheer it up at any moment, at any time, in any possible way, for any possibility of hope; they seem to remind us how the spirit could so often sound like the “meaningless” tunes of lullabies as “London Bridge is falling down falling down” or in the forms of “blues.” Indeed, “in such a world as ours,” to keep hope flickeringly alive from being extinguished “takes courage, even heroism.” These tunes certainly always sound as much familiar to us as the simple, strong, and rhythmically life-assuring and soul-caressing heartbeats of our mothers’ that we always listen to even since we are mere fetuses. In this regard, as is still the case with the second stanza of the last part, all these words in the context, such as “winding,” “which,” “without,” “were,” and even “sweet,” would all perform so immaculately to act out the meaning through such seemingly meaningless flows of sounds, especially when they are all thoughtfully grouped together around the keywords “water

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and rock” as equal contributing elements however otherwise they all could be so habitually categorized as discretely as “meaningful” content words or “meaningless” function words. Meanwhile, concentrated around another keyword “mountain,” the other commonplace content words and function words, that is, “month,” “among,” “amongst,” and “mudracked,” likewise, also become equal partners while contributing to the implicit destiny-defying sense of humor and merry-making spirit that resurface alive in the verbal strings. All these words become so impeccably intertwined with the “rock”-“water”-centered phonemic flows regardless of their “predestined” lexical meaning or parts of speech; together, they effectively make and mark the tenaciously live spirit of humanity that brings hope and breaks up the endlessly relaying mood of despair in ways otherwise utterly impossible for each word to be and to mean by itself in this capacity especially as regards each word’s discrete lexical meaning and dictionary designated parts of speech. Indeed, as will be discussed in the next section, only in this verbal music-making way, our common language apparently manages to say or to express what otherwise can “only be shown, not said of” at least according to Wittgenstein as Bertrand Russell so points out.80 The meaningful context words, such as “water,” “rock,” “drop,” and “mountain,” would therefore ironically become further meaningful by lowering or accommodating their “lofty” verbal status as “content words” even if just temporarily or expediently to their actual phonemic beings or functions; they live up to their utmost potential as words in the live context through a surreptitious process of verbal transformation as “functionalization” for a serendipitously meaningful impact; it is particularly so when we come to notice how these w-alliterated words are actually used along with all the w-sounding content words and function words, that is, “were,” “we,” “with,” and “without,” to make themselves further meaningful by the least expected means in this live context of resonant meaning-making verbal flow inasmuch the same way as the /ɒ/-sounding words, that is, “water,” “rock,” and “drop” do. As to be repeatedly further explained from time to time in the following sections of the preface and then chapter by chapter, these concurring and interplaying verbal patterns exemplified here with the /ɒ/-sounding words and w-alliterated words therefore literally mark a vital but subtle process of verbal transformation, which is virtually inherent in but often appears so simultaneously further enlivening the live context of The Waste Land that enlivens it. Literally, the verbal transformation makes it possible for the poem to flow naturally from inside out truly as a “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” without unnecessarily confined to any strictly preset rhyming pattern. In the process of verbal transformation, content words could often become functionalized in the live context to assume the roles of function words, whereas function words could be nominalized or verbalized

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to acquire the power of content words. As to be specified in the following sections prior to further detailed discussions in the following related chapters, the function words, such as “the” and “and,” could often appear to be so indiscriminately contextualized to acquire the de facto power of nouns and verbs, whereas all the other words, be they “meaningful” content words or “meaningless” function words, also seem to become so impeccably functional as long as they carry the common or compatible vowel sounds, such as /ɒ/, and w-sound. All these words would thus often appear so perfectly functionable or performative in the live context as if no more or no less than exactly the way they could actually sound together in the process of a meaningful verbal flow rather than what they would otherwise mean discretely each by itself. These are therefore indeed the verbal flows that could not only be but also mean simply through their very being or their very being of becoming, a posteriori, together, so at once in accordance with and in spite of whatever lexical meaning or presumably authorial intention. The lives of these words are thus so contingent solely upon the actual roles that they perform in the forever meaning-making void of live context. The simple flows of the “sound message” often sound more meaningful than the lexically defined “verbal message,” which often does seem to become the mere medium for the deliverance of the “sound message” in such a serendipitously reversed ironic role. The simple verbal flows that deliver the simple “sound message” in this regard do go well around the simple theme, which appears as much deeply inherent in the repeated thumping sounds of thunderclaps of “da, da, da,” as in many other allusions in English or in the foreign tongues. With the “sound message” delivered in ways of the utmost unambiguous simplicity the empty rainless dry sounds of thunderclaps would indeed convey the humanitysustaining divine voices of “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih” as “the same triads—restraint, honesty, and compassion” from the Upanishad as through the same simple message that concludes Four Quartets with the ultimate recognition of the culminating moment as the fire and the rose become one. With such a simple hope-caressing “sound message” delivered in the impeccable humble sounds of words. the power of “complete simplicity” inherent in the “sound message” seems to sustain life and humanity ultimately in ways that the intricate rational power apparently cannot. Therefore, when we listen to the “intermediary sensation”-arousing or “auditory imagination”-awakening sounds and rhythms inherent in our native tongues and even in the foreign tongues that we also speak fluently we would then, as Foucault would also thus suggest, at least momentarily break free from the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements, grouped together into a system” preset in “the order of things” for ideas and discourse, which would then so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots

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an organization that is not that of representation”;81 we could then momentarily break free, in other words, from an otherwise endless repetition of a given paradigm of discourses for concepts and ideas built solely upon, as in Foucault’s words, their “resemblance” with one another as “received truth,” which is, as Roland Barthes points out with reference to Nietzsche, “only solidification of old metaphor.”82 In this way, The Waste Land, as much as Four Quartets does, finally examines and demonstrates the limit of the rational power contingent upon preset “order of things” in handling “the ungraspable phantom” of life and, at the same time, showcases the simple tenacious power of hope. This tenacious power of hope undoubtedly sustains the rational power as regards its grand attempts to grasp “the ungraspable phantom” of humanity however limited as it is by its own means; it sustains humanity in ways more than the sheer rational power is capable of.83 In fact, as will be discussed later, the quoted lines above correspond significantly well with the first part of The Waste Land, especially with regard to the first two stanzas, which also noticeably carry the simple commonplace words mediated verbal structure or strings, particularly in terms of the use of the frequently repeatable function words. With the subtly despair-defying playful tones and some additional ironical implications, the verbal phenomena literally demonstrate how The Waste Land has the verbal power to let sound be and mean in whatever performative, participatory, and/or narrative ways necessary or possible, no matter how these alternative ways of expression often unfortunately exceed the habitual range or focus of our “normal” attention. PERFORMATIVE NONSENSE AND THE CRUCIAL ROLE OF SOUND Therefore, would not the message of hope also be possibly discovered in what often appears at the first sight as utterly incompressible, utterly incommunicable, or purely nonsensical allusions, as the cases above may so indicate? Indeed, with sounds thus taken into consideration as subtle and vital meaning-suggesting elements, there would instantly appear a related perspective, especially in terms of Wittgenstein’s and Herder’s interplaying views of language. One obviously focuses on logic, syntax, and “meaning” of nonsense, whereas the other concentrates on sounds, “intermediary sensation,” the emotive and imaginative context that make nonsenses meaningful or subtly sensemaking. If, for Wittgenstein, “[t]he essential business of language,” as Bertrand Russell points out, “is to assert or deny facts,” here therefore comes “perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Mr. Wittgenstein’s theory on logic and language,” which is, so specifically about “something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact.”84

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As something of a connection-making super- or meta-structure, this “something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact” is so essential as regards our common capability of communicating about reality in such an irreplaceable way that even if just “for whatever we may say,” we “will still need to have the same structure”;85 we need it because this meta-structure “has to be in common between the sentences and the fact,” although the meta-structure itself is also something that simply “cannot . . . be itself in turn said in language.”86 Indispensable as it is, the meta-structure is nonetheless indeed something that can “only be shown, not said”;87 it can only be, in other words, performed as the case with The Waste Land, which is by nature as much performative or theatrical as merely narrative and descriptive. This is why, as Wittgenstein himself often so emphasizes how “when the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words,”88 which is as much as to say that “If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.”89 Otherwise, neither would there be “riddle” nor “skepticism,” which is, in this regard, “not irrefutable but nonsensical.”90 The reason simply is “when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked,”91 nor would there even be a doubt for the same reason because “doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”92 This probably explains the phenomenon, which, as Reeves points out, no matter how “for all the commentary and analysis it has attracted, [The Waste Land] remains a riddle, and not only to its readers but also . . . to itself” and why as “a poem that is a riddle to itself [it] must remain so: it can be elucidated but not paragraphed.”93 However, it could still be so doubtful in this regard as to whether The Waste Land could possibly even be elucidated as a “riddle,” which is so likely “not irrefutable but nonsensical,” if we take it seriously the issues in ways as Wittgenstein discusses about them. Even so, however nonsensical as it could often possibly appear from time to time, everything of The Waste Land remains meaningfully performative with all its often meaningless or nonsensical sounding allusions, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down,” with which meaning can “only be shown, not said” or only be performed by the means of sound or verbal music improvised, not stated. This scenario therefore indicates how the text of The Waste Land would indeed often appear unlikely to be ever truly made sense of especially in terms of all the allusions that make up the bulk of the text; it nonetheless suggests how everything could still be possibly understood as long as we could appropriately figure out whether, how or how likely there are such compatible or translatable structures of syntax between what language asserts or denies and the facts it asserts and denies in ways as much likely be shown as be said. The case with The Waste Land does in this regard suggest

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to us how even nonsenses could still be made sense of as long as we know how they may express what can “only be shown, not said,” a posteriori, by means of sounds as performed or improvised live as an indispensable alternative approach of reading. There would certainly even be the specific cases as regards those allusions quoted all directedly from the original texts in foreign tongues. The cases, however, would concern not so much of the issues of ideas and syntax, which would eventually find their compatible versions or equivalent structures in English for translation, but rather of these utterly or virtually untranslatable “intermediary sensation”-invoking sounds. These sounds are all so peculiar to each specific foreign tongue as to make it almost impossible to find any compatible phonetic structure for any possible rendition. The utterly untranslatable but irreplaceably important sounds and the “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” that the sounds so often invoke alive in the equally untranslatable live context would nonetheless still be possibly made sense of by means of what Wittgenstein calls the indispensable sensemaking “atmosphere” that would “accompany[ ] the word . . . into every kind of [narrative] application.”94 Indeed, as always, “there’s the rub,” which concerns, on the one hand, the vital and subtle “intermediary sensation”-invoking sounds and, on the other hand, the indispensability and untranslatability of these crucial atmospherically sensemaking sounds. If so, does it not therefore also amount to say that, it is not until we could really figure them all out, the text of The Waste Land would then remain primarily as a jumble of nonsenses made at least of over 100 literary allusions? Does it not thus, in other words, also suggest hope or possibility of making sense of the poem, even if the jumble of allusions does not even include all the hidden ones, such as the possibly parodic references to Matsuo Bashō’s haikus on “sound of water” 水の音 (mizu no oto) and “lightening” (稲妻や ina tzuma ya) and “heroin’s cry” (五位の声 goi no koe), among other ones? Even so, the allusions, especially those ones in the original foreign tongues, do not really remain as simple nonsenses; they would become instead special kinds of meaningfully performing “speech acts” or performative nonsenses particularly in terms of Herder’s emphatic view on the power of sounds of language. As will be discussed further in the following chapters, especially chapter 5, the ­performative nonsenses reflect the hidden but innately performative nature of sound in language, which, as Herder sees it, often “has more an affair with” poetry as “the first language” that we spoke as humans at the very beginning about our utmost “intermediary sensation” of the whole wild world that we shared in common, rather than with idea, which is not only developed much later but also is “of more affinities with writing.”95 Does not Edmund Burke likewise also persuasively argue how “Men often act right from their feelings [to stimulation, such as from verbal music], who afterwards reason but

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ill on them from principle; but as it is impossible to avoid an attempt at such reasoning”?96 Indeed, the text of The Waste Land is so full of these expressive or performative sounds hidden in the allusions, which carry and convey “intermediary sensation” suggesting to us “the primitive wisdom” inherent in poetry made of the primordial language of our common humanity; it is made of, in other words, all these nonsensically meaning-performing sounds before we could literally make sense of the messages and meanings hidden in them especially in the foreign tongues. In fact, in the live verbal context of The Waste Land, the performatively “intermediary sensation”-invoking sounds, as such meaninglessly meaningful “nonsenses,” could run as far as from popular rap-like “Shakespearean Rag” through the gibberish-sounding Wagnerian Weialala chanting and the nonsensical nursey rhythm of the falling “London Bridge” to the onomatopoeic line of “da, da, da” from the Upanishads that concludes the whole poem as a thunderclaps-delivered divine message in Sanskrit. However, regardless of how nonsensical as they may initially appear and even before we could figure out their “meanings,” these otherwise weird allusions would still always sound so rich with meanings to the ear, heart, and soul as sensitively fine-tuned verbal music with all the hidden meaninglessly meaningful messages they deliver to us live as performative sounds. Undoubtedly, these otherwise purely nonsensical sounding allusions are always there hidden in the text enriching The Waste Land as the essential parts of “the poem’s philology,” which, according to Hugh Kenner, apparently as much “rhymes with such occasions” in this text as with “a Romantic quest for the primitive” in ways as “the early man” is perceived as “giving tongue to impassioned communion with thunder and falling water.”97 As regards the ways they often sound, these allusions do seem to resonate as if with the long-lasting echoes from the utmost remote past, which appears as “united with romantic Orientalism (Xanadu) to draw philosophical imagination back through Sanskrit to Indo-European roots.”98 For exactly the same reason, all these nonsensical sounding allusions so directly quoted, untranslated, from the original tongues would remain meaningfully performative only in their native languages; once translated with “meanings” for “ideas,” they could lose all their irreplaceably “autochthonous” flavor, as Michel Foucault might so suggest here along with Herder particularly with regard to one of Herder’s favorite cases. The German words blitz, for instance, once translated in English as “lightening,” as Herder so argues, would not “give[] the ear, with the help of an intermediary sensation, the feeling of sadness and rapidity which the eye had of lightening”99 Would this not probably also be one of the reasons for Eliot to keep so many allusions in their original versions, untranslated, especially at the end of the poem with all the five allusions juxtaposed one by one all in their original

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versions in English, Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit? Would this not, in other words, be a possible reason for them to be kept in this way to suggest so performatively, through the expressive sounds of words, the same tenacious message of tenacious hope, which keeps humanity alive in ways that could not be adequately “understood,” “made senses of,” or “translated” in terms of sheer logic or by the mere rational means? Is not the message of hope as much tenacious as the “primitive wisdom”-conveying “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination,” which keeps alive the same absurdly tenacious message of hope that keeps it alive through even the meaningless sounds of the existing foreign tongues in the utmost scenarios of despair? With such intimate experiences with poetry as the “first language” of humanity through sounds, “what more [could] poetry [be]?” other than “‘eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie’?—A Dictionary of the Soul, at once mythology and the wondrous epic of the actions and voices of all being”?100 Indeed, what would there be anything else further to be expected of poetry when poetry could “[t]hus [be] a stable mythopoeia for the passion and the mind” as regards the ultimate role of poetry as Herder so envisions it?101 The message of crucial hope is thus indeed inherent in the primordial sounds of the allusions as “performative nonsenses,” especially through the indispensable agency of readers as innovative “mon frère,” be it in English or in any foreign tongue, be it as intended, involuntary, or contextually enlivened. The tenacious message of hope, in other words, is thus always there in the allusions even before they could be literally translated for “meaning” at the irretrievable loss of the irreplaceable original atmospherically wordaccompanying “intermediary sensation.” These are the meaning-rich sensory and sensuous experiences that sounds carry and evoke alive as much from within themselves as from around the original verbal context through each specific application in ways as even Herder and Wittgenstein both would so emphasize here at this point. The text of The Waste Land would then certainly remain as an immeasurably meaning-rich void of chaos until the “meaning” of the sound is adequately recognized or made sense of. Even so, it would still forever exist as “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” so ready or open for incessant exploration at any time in the future. Therefore, undoubtedly, in the specific context, “[any nonsensical sounding allusions] are not to be likened to the unregulated sounds that rise from a musical instrument struck by the blow of some external force instead of by a player’s hand.”102 Consequently, in other words, “they are not meaningless, they are not absurd . . . ; they do not imply that one portion of our store of ideas is asleep while another portion is beginning to wake.”103 Rather, quite “on the contrary,” as much indicated in the discussions above as in the following sections and chapters, especially on issues of verbal transformation, the nonsensical sounding allusions would also suggest subtle and vital

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“psychical phenomenon of complete validity—fulfilments of wishes; they can be inserted into the chain of intelligible waking mental acts; they are constructed by a highly complicated activity of the mind.”104 Merely with the words “dreams” changed to the phrase “nonsensical sounding allusions,” this pivotal passage from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams could itself be so literally “inserted” here to become naturally such an adequate allusion or quotation along with the ones from Wittgenstein and Herder in shedding mutually illuminating lights on the very intricate nature of the issues as regards allusions, which often appear so at once enlivening and enlivened in the same live context in ways so characteristic of The Waste Land. Would not these “nonsensical sounding allusions” simultaneously also become true “allusions” in this sense because they literally allude to the possible scenarios of “wishfulfillment”? At this point, would it not be possible, in other words, even for us to come to wonder whether all the scenes of hopelessness are depicted, after all, even merely as the vehicles to bring out these sound messages of hope inherent in them in the surreptitious form of “wish-fulfillment,”105 especially through the phenomena of verbal transformation so characteristic of The Waste Land, be it as intended or as “unpremeditated, accidental”? Indeed, even if so different from Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets, which, according to Harold Bloom, “doubtless attempt to represent Christian redemption,” what The Waste Land appear so “blasphemous” about, however, is not so much about the decaying and dying of the Western civilization as many have been so arguing; it is rather about, as Bloom sees it, how it literally “reflects Eliot’s personal break-down in 1921, a reaction to the strain of his first marriage,” which, nonetheless, still reveals “the controlled hallucinations of the poem [that] seem to [Bloom] its authentic magnificence.”106 Would not this “authentic magnificence” thus also speak for what our “conscious mind calls [ ] subconscious,” which, as A. David Moody so puts it, along with Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, “can be an intensified or more developed form of conscious, drawing upon forgotten knowledge?”107 However, as to whether or how much this is really a case or not, it obviously exceeds the present scope and purpose of this discussion. TRUE WIT AS TEXT-SPECIFIC “MUSEUM EFFECT” ALIVE WITH READERS’ “INFORMED IMAGINATION” With such understanding of the performative nonsenses and the void of chaos in relation to the irreplaceable roles that sound plays in the live context of The Waste Land, all the mind-boggling allusions would then quite ironically turn out to be the “unpremeditated, accidental” but perfect mediums in suggesting the meaningfully sense-bewitching “intermediary sensation”

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or “auditory imagination”; they would, in other words, so instantly become the true language that suggests the true perspective of the “true wit” that we need to make sense of The Waste Land. “True Wit,” however, according to Alexander Pope in Essay on Criticism, “is Nature to advantage dress’d,” but it also means, as Pope insists, “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.”108 Even so, with the illuminating light of void understood as “langue” of the “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies,” the “true wit” should then refer to various live scenarios of “parole” that have not even been ever thought of before, especially in terms of how to read The Waste Land afresh in the light of void. This should be exactly what we need. Such a “true wit,” nonetheless, is still unlikely to be found anywhere else but ultimately in the meaning-generating void inherent in the text of The Waste Land itself; it still remains hidden there in the text at least in ways that have not ever been thought of; it is apparently, in other words, still under the radar of our usual attention especially in terms of Eliot’s own noticeable efforts in exploring phonemic components of words for the “sound message” through verbal music. The sound message is literally composed as much through the meaning-making lines as through the nonsenses-sounding sentences in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. As reflected in both poems, the “true wit” clearly emerges first in The Waste Land and then appears so timely culminated in Four Quartets. This strenuous process leading “true wit” toward its fruitful culmination reveals a gradual but coherent critical awareness or appreciation of void as a consistent holistic understanding of the meaningful “sound message” inherent even in the seemingly meaningless or nonsensical sounding verbal expressions. However often as it may be so readily labeled as “foreign” or “Greek” for habitual dismissal, this mind-refreshing “true wit” as critical awareness of meaningful void could suggest as many invaluable but hidden “practical” and “beautiful” mindsets as of the ancient Greek urn-makers. Is this not particularly true especially in terms of the ingenious Greek urnmakers’ down-to-earth “aesthetic” initiatives in making the utmost beauty of void in spite of our idealized elitist modern perception of beauty that would so often mislead us to the point of missing altogether the beauty of void in ways as Adolf Loos so emphasizes above? Without being so readily aware of the void of chaos as a matrix or as the immeasurable recesses from which the sweeter unheard melody echoes, we might still miss the “true wit” in ways as Laurence Sterne would also likely suggest because the “great wits jump” often across the boundaries and barriers of time and space as much as of disciplines and cultures.109 The true wit indeed jumps, as Herman Melville might also thus remind us, because, for him, “the great enterprise” would be likely as much inherent in “careful disorderliness” as in anywhere least expected.110 The true wit, as Ralph Waldo Emerson would further remind us,

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might even remain hidden in things of great inconsistency because “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”111 Without such awareness of the infinitely meaningful void of meaningless chaos and nonsenses, we would probably, in other words, miss the “true wit” of the real “sound message” of hope lingering in all the nonsensical sounding allusions as if forever so randomly scattered around in The Waste Land. Literally, it is indeed for the very pleasure of the writerly reading and within this very context of the void that we as readers would often find more than enough space for us to assume whatever roles that fit the reading process, be they as the author’s fellow conspirers, intimate soulmates, “bosom friends” or “strange bedfellows” as between Ishmael and Queequeg, or simply involuntary imposters on behalf of the author, dead, absent, or abstained. Undoubtedly, it is within this particular context of a void as deeply interpenetrated living ecologies of “langue” and through this particular relationship shaped on the spot between the author and the reader, we would have the opportunity to turn it performatively meaningful any nonsensical sounding “parole” in English or in any foreign tongue, no matter how meaningless as it may strike at the first sight. We would undoubtedly turn it collaboratively and performatively meaningful, so to speak, any “parole” inasmuch the same way as we would readily turn it expediently meaningful any “meaningless” function word and phoneme through the simultaneously text-enlivened and text-enlivening verbal transformation in ways so characteristic of The Waste Land as such an unusually collaborative and performative text of “true wit.” Certainly, as will be discussed in the next few passages, built upon at least over a 100 immediately recognizable literary allusions that make up the text of The Waste Lands, the ultimate meaning of “true wit” could literally be further understood in terms of the expediently analogizable notion of “museum effect”; it could probably even be further appreciated in terms of “informed imagination,” “negative capability,” and even jazz along with readers’ vividly evoked imagination. What is “museum effect” then? So characteristic of the text of The Waste Land, the term “museum effect” suggests briefly here how the artworks otherwise utterly discrete by themselves could sometimes appear so naturally belonging to one another as a group once put together for a special exhibition in the museum. Juxtaposed next to one another, the artworks could then often appear so naturally with one another even in such a way as if each were born exactly for the other within this particular group and for this particular occasion. At the same time, however, any one of them could also be so easily dissembled from the group either for an individual exhibition the way each deserves or for another grouping under a different exhibition theme. Therefore, even if the very existence or value of the artworks in question does not necessarily depend on one another, it does seem to be so contingent upon

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such an “unpremeditated, accidental” grouping or occasional juxtaposition, which apparently occasions or brings out from each artwork something as invaluable as in ways otherwise not possible. Do not all the allusions function exactly this way in the live context of The Waste Land particularly those quoted directly from such diverse or discrete original texts in the foreign languages and juxtaposed side by side particularly in ways as thus shown at the very end of the last part? In this regard, so should the case be adequately further understood in parallel with the notion of “informed imagination” as Isaiah Berlin defines it. Indeed, however complex as everything “through the stages of social growth” as “trends or tendencies” could possibly be each in its own way, be it “fascinating” thoughts from “Condorcet, Buckle, Marx, Machiavelli, Vico, [or from] Herder,” everything of our common humanity could still be possibly understood as “follow[ing] empirically discoverable patterns . . . , but moving to no single, universal goal; each a world on its own, yet having enough in common with its successors, with whom it forms a continuous line of recognizably human experience, not to be unintelligible to their inhabitants.”112 Indeed, perhaps, as Berlin so emphasizes, “Only in this way . . . can we hope to understand the unity of human history—the links that connect our own ‘magnificent times’ to our squalid beginnings in ‘the great forest of the earth.’”113 In addition to its phenomenal use of all the discrete literary allusions so widely assembled from across disciplines and cultures, does not this phenomenon as “museum effect” or “informed imagination” here also seem to coincide so impeccably in parallel with the scenario of “verbal transformation” as regards all the discrete “meaningless” function words and “meaningful” content words especially in terms of their specifically grouped functions? As mentioned above, does not each word so transformed, a posteriori, in the live context of The Waste Land often mean so serendipitously in ways so fruitfully at once in accordance with and in spite of the otherwise discrete lexical meanings, parts of speech, and their phonemic beings? THE MESSAGE OF HOPE IN THE JAZZ-LIKE ALLUSIONS IMPROVISED AVEC MON FRÈRE With the intricate scenario of “langue” of void so understood in terms of “museum effect” and “informed imagination,” the “true wit” could certainly be further made sense of as another special case of “parole” that speaks for the all-absorbing and all-improvising power of the “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” of “langue” as the special version of “negative capability” of void. The special sense of “true wit” could then also be so expediently made sense of in this regard with reference to the live example

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of jazz. Literally, in ways as a jumble made of at least over 100 literary references and allusions, the text of The Waste Land could undoubtedly be as much appreciated as a piece of jazz music, such as the piece by Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Richard Galliano titled “From Billie Holiday To Edith Piaf.”114 The piece certainly allows as usual each individual musician to play solo one after another but in ways as if only to prepare themselves for the critical moment when they could all play the same tune together. When the critical moment arrives, they would play together, yet in ways so discretely radiant at different ranges and directions, in all conceivable rhythmic modulations. With all flamboyant styles of improvisation, this “chaotically” improvising performance makes the piece sound so dissonantly harmonious or harmoniously dissonant. Indeed, in the jumbled musical text of the over one-hour long ensemble, all the different tunes thus used or improvised, such as “The Girl from Ipanema,” “Summertime,” and “La vie en rose,” are very much like different allusions in The Waste Land in ways so discretely mixed with one another. The tunes however sound so resonantly interpenetrated with one another through the otherwise drastically different themes they each carry especially when played together at the same time by different musicians with different musical instruments, such as trumpet, accordion, and saxophone. Together, the different tunes suggest different moods in constant variations through improvisation making the piece a harmonious jumble of melodies in ways as compatible as over 100 literary allusions do with The Waste Land. Also quite reminiscent of the piece by Marsalis and Galliano, the literary allusions in the text of The Waste Land create a verbal collage of various literary sources and genres from classical to popular as from written to oral literature across the usual boundary of genres and styles as of time and space in making the text of The Waste Land truly the immeasurable “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies.” However, when all these literary references and allusions of The Waste Land are adequately taken into consideration side by side like all the different tunes that make up the jazz piece, there would immediately emerge these compatible and mutually illuminating scenarios. One may not necessarily know every single tune or tone mixed in the jazz piece all at once initially. This “ignorance” however does not hinder one from truly enjoying the whole piece all the way along. Neither would there be the necessity nor the possibility for anyone to stop halfway through or from time to time to check out every bit and piece of tune that makes the piece of music but may not appear immediately recognizable however much it may sound so familiar at the same time. Even so, one would still have the pleasure in flowing along with the flow of music or simply “island-hopping” from time to time along the way. One may not immediately recognize, for instance, the familiar but subtly improvised Brazilian tune “The Girl from Ipanema” as it

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occurred to me myself initially when I happened to listen to the ensemble for the first time. Furthermore, discovering or eventually recognizing the familiar tune or tone afterward would certainly add so much to one’s appreciation and understanding of the piece with a long-lasting aftertaste. This should be exactly such compatible scenarios that we should keep in mind for the very fun or the due pleasure in handling this very challenging “writerly” process of reading The Waste Land. Therefore, as Eliot’s “mon semblable,—mon frère” in chasing often so jazz-like or so à la recherché du temps perdu the rhythmically elusive or illusive meaning and beauty of The Waste Land, we would likewise be certainly endowed with as much power as a responsibility to turn even the most nonsensical of allusions into infinitely meaningful and mutually illuminating vital elements of poetry that make The Waste Land quintessentially a text truly not only of the “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” but also of the “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty,” be it understood as “museum effect,” “informed imagination,” “negative capability,” or, as will be discussed in chapter 1, “philosophical imagination” in ways as Michèle Le Dœuff so defines it in addition to Hugh Kenner. This is exactly what would become of us as readers or as “mon frère” as indicated by this otherwise utterly nonsensical literary reference to the last line of Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du Mal, “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” The intricately collaged text of The Waste Land is certainly not a traditional readerly text and the burden of understanding falls squarely upon us as readers. As a reader, one therefore must assume the authorial role and responsibility in the disguise of a reader to figure out the meanings from the meaningfully collaged “meaningless” texts. The reader would otherwise indeed become such a “hypocrite” if he did not try his utmost to help out as a de facto author by assuming an active “writerly” role as an author while reading the text. Does he not supposedly know as much as the author simply as author’s “brother” or “twin?” As such a de factor author in the process of writerly reading, the reader of The Waste Land, as James Miller so indicates, would often be so encouraged even to act “almost as though [he had the poem] snatched from the author’s hands and cut, shaped, and read to fit the needs of an ailing modern age”;115 he may even make the poem of The Waste Land “before [the author’s] very eye . . . metamorphosed into another identity, another existence, with which [Eliot] himself would eventually need to come to terms.”116 To emphasize the pivotal power of Geist that makes Faust from both within and without through the irreplaceable agency of Goethe, C. G. Jung once famously stated how “it is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe”117 Paraphrasing the statement especially along with its emphatically placed chiastic pattern, we may also say that “it is not Eliot who creates The Waste Land, but The Waste Land which creates Eliot”

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through the indispensable agency of his readers as his inalienable “mon semblable,—mon frère.” This paraphrased statement would certainly help making it clear how The Waste Land’s irresistible influences on all its readers would also come to reshape or recreate itself through the writerly process of reading it creates; the process would certainly also persists regardless of whether “the author” is really “dead,” as Roland Barthes so asserted in the footsteps of Nietzsche who proclaimed the death of God.118 Consequently, as Miller also indicates, “all of the diversity of interpretive opinion on The Waste Land was something that Eliot was himself acutely aware of, and which clearly changed the way he looked at poetry and his own poetry in particular.”119 For Miller, “the most enduring and profound effect . . . on reading The Waste Land,” would therefore probably be such a common recognition for us “to reinforce the advice implicit in one statement after another from poet himself: stop making The Waste Land mean.”120 However, once The Waste Land could indeed be let be in this way, it would then remain, as Gareth Reeves would so see it, “a poem that is a riddle to itself,” which only “can be elucidated but not paragraphed.”121 If so, the poem, however, could then indeed truly mean at least in ways as it would be so naturally performative in its utmost theatrical being that would guilelessly mean, regardless of whether or how it could even be possibly taken as “a riddle” in ways as Wittgenstein would so forcefully doubt as above. Whatever the case, not to be at least as much “bored” as hypocrite brother or twin, the reader should, in other words, as Eliot and Barthes both may so suggest at this point, assume the active responsibility as a “writerly” reader probably in as variable and alternating a role as each jazz player does in the jazz ensemble above; he must even assume such an actively diversified role as the chameleon-like versatile nameless single-protagonist regardless of whether the author would really be as much declared “dead” the moment he “finished” his work or his part of work.122 He must do so even if simply to dodge the seemingly ever-present grip of “Ennui” as the irreversible destiny that awaits every reader in ways as Baudelaire as well as Eliot himself would so warn us: “There is one viler and more wicked spawn, / Which never makes great gestures or loud cries / Yet would turn earth to wastes of sumps and sties / And swallow all creation in a yawn,” which is “Ennui!”; it is so “Moist-eyed perforce, worse than all other, / Dreaming of stakes, he smokes his hookah pipe. Reader, you know this fiend, refined and ripe, / Reader, O hypocrite—my like!—my brother!”123 As Eliot’s invited participatory “bosom friends,” his “mon semblable,— mon frère,” we, as readers of The Waste Land, would certainly have in one way or another experienced the unique performative and participatory nature of language as significantly explored in the poem, especially in terms of Eliot’s text-enlivening, soul-evoking, and “true wit”-invoking use of allusions. In The

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Waste Land, as will be further discussed chapter by chapter in accordance with the specific scenarios of each chapter, this performative and participatory nature of language will be explained particularly in terms of how the meaning of The Waste Land often emerges as the due output of the intricate network or the “langue” of the deeply interpenetrated ecologies; it would be particularly explained in terms of how this special network is made not only of the “meaningful” content words but also of “meaningless” or simply too trivial to be noticeable function words and phonemes; it will be further explained as regards how these verbal and phonemic elements could remain in the text as various influential but too trivial to be recognizable de facto allusions. Many function words and phonemes would therefore become in this way such surreptitious and yet often serendipitous meaning-making performative elements invoked or recognized through the immediate agency of the participatory readers as author’s irreplaceable “mon frère.” This indispensable agency of readers’ would even often occasion subtle and significant “sea changes” in meaning simply being where these elements are in the text, be they “meaningless” function words, phonemes, or “nonsensical” allusions in foreign tongues. This indispensable agency would not only cause these elements to become serendipity-making improvised tunes or leitmotifs from time to time but also make the reader truly “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher,” a posteriori, in the process of “writerly” reading as Montaigne would so suggest.124 This “writerly” reading in the live context of The Waste Land thus means exactly the performative and participatory agency of readers,’ which often so simultaneously enlivens the text that enlivens it especially in terms of the performative power as much inherent in the language itself as in the allusions taken directly, untranslated, from foreign tongues for the purpose of exploring the performative “intermediary sensation” inherent in them. Therefore, however otherwise as utterly “meaningless” as many of the function words and phonemes, these otherwise “nonsensical” allusions would indeed make it possible along with the function words and phonemes shaped in resonant patterns for the poem to flow naturally and ultimately so meaningfully from inside out. These directly quoted lines from foreign tongues, such as Weialala leia / Wallala leialala,” “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina/Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow/Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie,” “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih,” including the half-translated “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” all demonstrate, in other words, their performatively and collaboratively meaning-making magic power in the live context of The Waste Land often so serendipitously through their “meaningless” or even “nonsensical” presence at the first sight inasmuch the same way as the “meaningless” function words and phonemes would. By “performative” and “participatory,” it therefore literally means in this context how language is explored in The

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Waste Land in such collaboratively performative a way not only through the performative and collaborative power inherent in language but also through readers’ actively occasioned involvement or participation; everything of the text of The Waste Land is therefore not simply explored to tell a story as usual but to act it out, a posteriori, simultaneously in accordance with and in spite of whatever the meaning of a word so set, a priori, in the dictionary; it certainly also means how all the allusions would thus act out their meanings or to be made sense of in the live context particularly through the “primitive wisdom”-conveying “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” that the allusions each carry at once along with and against any presumably original or authorial meanings. This “luck” of capturing meaning alive on the spot in the text would certainly not occur without being timely occasioned through the active mediation through readers as intimately involved “mon frère” in the process of the “writerly” reading. Indeed, in the live context of The Waste Land, all these nonsenses-like allusions so hard to make sense of at the first sight, such as the allusion of “mon frère” from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal, would all then gradually appear not only so meaningful but also so instrumental for us to understand The Waste Land as Eliot’s indispensable “mon frère.” Even this otherwise sheer gibberish-sounding line “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” from Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung would also turn out like a special kind of grand piece of “Water Music” by another distinguished German composer only for the purpose to be acted out or performed as a special “speech act” for the full impact of parody of a oncecelebrated moment of royal grandeur. THE REVERSIBILITY OF THE MEANINGFUL AND THE NONSENSICAL THROUGH VERBAL TRANSFORMATION This specific case with performative and participatory use of language is indeed so much in line with the specific way that Eliot explores to make his pomes flow naturally from inside out without being unduly confined to any traditional poetic rhyming scheme. Even at the very beginning section of this poem, the rhythmic form or pattern that Eliot uses for The Waste Land appears so characteristic not only of the poem itself but also of Eliot’s poetry at large, particularly Four Quartets. However, with the poem set in such a natural way to flow from inside out, it is no longer possible to be scanned merely in any usual way for a possibly adequate understanding of the natural power that its rhythmic verbal pattern so characterizes; the poem, in other words, no longer fits in any traditional syllabic counting way of scanning for the purpose, such as iambic pentameter, or any strictly set end rhyming pattern, for example,

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sonnet or sestina. Given its constantly variable and actively performative and participatory nature, the poem of The Waste Land would rather need to be appropriately made sense of in accordance with the pivotal phoneme-based and function-words-mediated pattern of verbal strings or flows through such a subtle but vital process of verbal transformation as nominalization, verbalization, and/or functionalization. In the live context of The Waste Land, this process of verbal transformation is virtually inherent in the poem itself as an infinite process of “rhythmic creation of [meaningful] beauty.” However, without the text-enlivened and text-enlivening hidden power of the otherwise utterly meaningless function words, the process would not even possibly occur in the first place. The irreplaceable power of function words, such as “the,” as revealed in the process of nominalizing, is certainly by no means noticed for the first time; what still remains an issue, however, is ultimately how or how much the crucial hidden power of function words should be literally recognized and how it should be then adequately assessed. The important impacts of function words in the text do on occasions capture critics’ attention even if often merely in the form of passing comments. Karl Shapiro, for instance, noticed how in W. H. Auden “adverbs / Took on the bold appearance of real things / And pronouns masqueraded as ideas.”125 However, not with such brief passing comments but through detailed analysis on the intricate cases concerning Henry James’s later novels, Seymour Chatman noticed how the hidden process of nominalization is by no means merely an isolated or occasional literary phenomenon; it is rather a quite compatible common scenario as often identifiable elsewhere in ways as so exemplified in James’s later novels, in which, when function words appear nominalized as “its,” “thats,” “whiches,” and so on, they become, as in Chatman words, “not merely being referred to [. . . but] are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, as substantial as any character” with a consequence as “almost ‘a sort of personification.’”126 This phenomenon of verbal transformation is also implicitly recognized in terms of its criticism by scholars, such as G. Rostrevor Hamilton, who noticeably criticized the tendency of overusing the definite article by contemporary poets, such as Auden and Eliot. This tendency, as Hamilton saw it, by means of unnecessarily elevating the noun groups, not only undermines “the native energy of the verb” but also, as a result, causes damages to “the structure of the English language” to such a degree as to push further the antihumanist trend common to modern writers.127 David Trotter noticed how Auden’s extreme reliance on the definite article impacts Eliot in terms of the latter’s work, such as Four Quartets,128 even if such impact could be detected particularly in retrospection as early as in The Love of J. Alfred Prufrock, let alone in The Waste Land. Rightly as “one of Eliot’s most astute readers,”129 Steve Ellis suggestively further specifies how the tendency of overusing the definite

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article could appear at times as antihumanist because the “objects” as definitively confirmed or certified by the extensive power of the definite article would then “confidently ‘realize’ themselves in the poetry of the period without any suggestion of a perceiving ‘I,’ [which] is very much abetted by this use of the definite article.”130 While this phenomenon of “overusing” the definite article could be no doubt merely a telltale tip of an iceberg of an overall phenomenon of verbal transformation, as indicated in the above cases with “the,” the persona as the vital self-conscious “perceiving I” might not have been as much abetted, if at all, at least, not so much the case with The Waste Land or with Four Quartets. Quite contrarily, as indicated by the extensive use of “the” that appears to itemize everything of reality as if with such an insatiable sense of curiosity, the perceiving-I’s humanity instead emerges significantly further substantiated through his seemingly insatiable curiosity about life, which may signify his incessant action in bonding with life. With each specific occasion of “the” being repeatedly used, the perceiving-I’s dogged attempt to grip on everything of life appears so minutely “documented” by means of itemization, which therefore would become, in other words, the actual ways that “[w]e picture facts to ourselves,” as Wittgenstein would so indicate here.131 Indeed, as Wittgenstein would also thus emphasize here as above, with reference to Newtonian mechanics as an example, the “the”-mediated process of itemization would become a picture that pictures a picture of reality, the way we choose to see it—the way of an opaque mirror that reflects not only an ambiguous image of reality with variable options to see it but also our actual capability and motivation to see or to perceive it. Undoubtedly, as will be discussed further in the following chapters, if “in The Waste Land, the feeling of being awash in sexual anxiety,” as Jewel Brooker and Joseph Bentley point out, “is generated by the catalog of sordid couplings in “The Fire Sermon,”132 this crucial data collected of cataloging is unlikely to be accomplished without the indispensable agency of functions words, such as “the,” which also speaks so personably in this “impersonal” way for the ever-present influences of human agency even when it appears absent or abstained from time to time. THE MESSAGE OF HOPE ALIVE WITH PERCEIVING-I THROUGH READERS IN THE ITEMIZED WORDED WORLD Why is this the case? It is the case because function words, such as “the,” do have the power so instrumental in helping us to paint a picture in words as much as to capture a model of reality because “a picture,” as Wittgenstein

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puts it, “is a model of reality.”133 The reason, also according to Wittgenstein, is that “a picture presents a situation in logical space,” which therefore certainly includes “the existence and non-existence of states of affairs”134 as much as what can “only be shown, not said.” These “states of affairs” would, in other words, include what is painted and what is left unpainted as void, blank space as housu, dayin, “sweeter, unheard melody,” or as the indispensable sensemaking “atmosphere [that] accompany[ied] [every scene as much as every] word [that] carried with [it] into every kind of application.”135 This is because ultimately “a thought is a proposition with a sense” especially as a picture painted in words.136 The use of function words, such as “the,” carries the picture-making power of personification through itemization because “a picture, conceived in this way, also includes the pictorial relationship, which makes it into a picture”137 Even if not used to such intensive degree as in Four Quartets, the use of “the” in this ways in The Waste Land not only itemizes but also personifies “the pictorial relationship [that] consists of the correlations of the picture’s elements with things.”138 The scenario is therefore very much like “when translating one language [of the real world] into another, [that is, the worded world] we do not proceed by translating each proposition of the one into a proposition of the other, but merely by translating the constituents of the propositions”;139 this scenario, in other words, is very much like the way when dictionary translates one language into another because it “translates not only substantives, but also verbs, adjectives, and conjunctions, etc.; and it treats them all in the same way.”140 Therefore, as long as we need to make a picture of reality, we need function words the way it is used in The Waste Land and the way Wittgenstein elucidates. However, the unique but hidden yet to be fully recognized power or agency of function words, for William James, often becomes even more important because it is immediately related with our fundamental experience with the world itself in ways as Wittgenstein suggests. Indeed, as James so emphasizes in his Radical Empiricism, to acquire the “immediate feeling” or our direct experience with the true rhythms of life, we should take these little things, such as “conjunctions,” as seriously “as primordial elements of ‘fact’ . . . the distinctions and disjunctions.”141 He explains how and why we should pay attention to things that appear as trivial or insignificant as “prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but’”;142 it is because these function words “compenetrate harmoniously” to make it possible for us to understand how life may “flow out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and . . . melt into it again as fluidly when we apply [the function words] to a new portion of the stream.”143 With the linguistic scenario so understood, even “the tacit conversations on which the understanding of everyday language

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depends,” as Wittgenstein also so tacitly admits, “are enormously complicated.”144 The “perceiving I” would therefore by no means be abetted to disappear; instead, he would become further interpenetrated alive with the language or submerged further into “The [infinite] totality of proposition [, which] is language,” per se.145 The impression of “the perceiving I” as being abetted to disappear due to the use of function words, such as “the,” could largely result from the live process of thinking and observing itself, which, according to Theodor Adorno, would cause “the author’s impulses [to become] extinguished in the objective substance they grasp” because “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”146 However, even with the authorial “impulses” that may thus appear possibly “extinguished” into each and everything it has itemized, the humanity of the “perceiving I,” in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, often emerge serendipitously further substantiated through the process of itemization. The process thus literally speaks for an acutely all-grasping perception so inexhaustibly alive in itself in ways as indicated by the incessant use of each and every “the” in ways as William James also thus indicates. Therefore, the “perceiving I” would thus often appear so alive with its ubiquitous presence through everything it itemizes. The “perceiving I” could therefore still appear present even when it is literally absent; it would still appear, in other words, “absently present” or “presently absent” in the actual context particularly when the text is timely mediated through the ever-present and fully motivated agency of function words, such as “the.” As will be discussed further in detail in the following chapters, not only could the “perceiving I”’s status and identity, but his perspectives could also be possibly further understood in accordance with the atmospherically ever-present “I-Thou” and “I-Other” relationships that constitute the narrative structure and “points of view” of The Waste Land in ways so compatible with those familiar ones in the biblical text, be it understood in Martin Buber’s version or Immanuel Levinas’s. Everything of the “perceiving-I” as a nameless chameleon-like versatile single protagonist could therefore also be understood together with the various literary scenarios as “unpremeditated, accidental” allusions through the readers’ evoked imagination especially when they are accepted as the narrator’s actively all participating “mon semblable,—mon frère[s].” These evoked additional allusions could often refresh our approaches to the text with reference to any familiar and relevant literary texts even if not among those most readily identified or identifiable ones, such as those from Dante, Wagner, the Upanishads, and so on. These evoked additional allusions could certainly include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” William Blake’s “London,” Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago,” James Wright’s “A Blessing,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by

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Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Mending Wall,” and even Matsuo Bashō’s haikus, among numerous others. Even if the reason still remains unclear why Harold Bloom considers “T. S. Eliot, a minor critic compared to Johnson,” he indeed “became a strong poet by revising Tennyson and Whitman in The Waste Land”147 in making the poem such a rich void of interpenetrated meaning-generating chaos reminiscent of living cultural ecologies, undoubtedly through the indispensable role or agency of readers as his special “mon frère” in ways as Bloom himself so personifies here at this point. In this regard, the perceiving I’s function-words-mediated status, identities, and perspectives must also be further made sense of together with all these elements particularly in terms of whether, how, or how much, with which allusion borrowed from what different contexts for which conceivable purpose. Such considerations must inevitably also suggest viewpoints or perspectives as involuntarily borrowed even beyond or despite the actual or presumably original authorial intentions or purposes because language could so often betray such an “unwillingness to subject itself to classic discipline”148 especially in the live context or in an active process of writerly reading. With the ubiquitous agency of a reader as “mon frère” and the ever-present mediation of functions words, it would even appear increasingly doubtful as to whether or how likely, if at all, “the author’s impulses,” as Adorno so emphasizes, would indeed ever become “extinguished in the objective substance they grasp” simply because, quite ironically, with exactly the same reason he himself supplies, that is, “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”149 Would it not be likely the case with The Waste Land, which should stay infinitely enriched through the theoretically inexhaustible supply of “additional” allusions so evoked alive, a posteriori, as much by readers as by the text itself? Would not the text itself, in other words, thus remain as “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” of an inexhaustibly meaning-rich void as always, as forever, especially in such a way that grants the “perceiving I” the infinitely opportunities to enrich himself with his incessantly renewed identities? THE MESSAGE OF HOPE IN SOUND-INVOKED “INTERMEDIARY SENSATION” OR “AUDITORY IMAGINATION” After all, regardless of how we might evaluate all these intricate phenomena that make The Waste Land such a challenging poem, the highly repetitive function-words-mediated and phonemes-based resonant verbal strings remain the utmost vital factors that guarantee the text of The Waste Land to flow as

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much naturally from inside out as truly “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty.” They are indeed the pivotal factors that make The Waste Land flow so freely from inside out in ways quite compatible with Four Quartets; they make it possible, in other words, for the poem to be free from being so unduly confined to any type of preset Procrustean patterns based solely on the strict syllabic counting and restrictive end rhyme schemes. As a result, neither The Waste Land nor Four Quartets would appear, once again, as in Foucault’s words, arbitrarily confined by all such “formal elements, which impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.” The use of function words, such as “the,” “a,” “and,” “after,” wherever necessary or in whatever ways possible particularly in terms of frequency of their appearance or even their “participatory absence,” not only sustains but also facilitates the overflowing “emotion.” In fact, in the context of The Waste Land, the use of function words in ways discussed here does make the “formal elements” no longer “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation”; instead it does make them become actively contributing meaning-making elements, be they “meaningless” function words or too trivial to be noticeable phonemes. Such a use of function words, in other words, makes all these otherwise “meaningless” or pure “formal elements” literally count as meaning-making equal contributing elements in letting the overflowing emotion channeled naturally from inside out for the smooth delivery of the poetic message of hope in the rhythmic flows. In ways as indicated here in the “the”-mediated lines in the beginning stanza of the third part, there is undoubtedly the atmospherically empty life suggesting rhythmic fluidity with each living object or sign of life so itemized in detail or in ways that suggest as if barely perceptible slow motion; these naturally channeled rhythmic verbal flows would therefore also likely evoke the life-affirming impacts of “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination,” as will be discussed further in the third chapter, even from amidst the scenes of the utmost despair and desolation as suggested in the beginning stanza of the third part’s, “The river’s tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf . . . sink into the wet bank. The wind/Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed” (WL III, i). Therefore, is this not exactly the case with the beginning line of the third part “The Fire Sermon”? Does not the simple use of the definite article in juxtaposition or in close sequence give the vivid impression of how the nymphs flow out of the Unreal city of London one after another in ways as sluggishly as the sluggishly flowing river? Indeed, when everything appears so minutely itemized with the definite article used or explored in this way in the context, would not each itemized detail even come to suggest as an emphatic innuendo how unbelievably even “[t]he nymphs are departed” in the end along with an inferable mood of disbelief, dismay, and/or despair?

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In this regard, with each “the” thus used, the potential power of nominalization inherent in the definite article would then also appear as objectified or actualized in such a way as even to suggest, so unmistakably, a sense of a steady or sluggish motion, a posteriori, ad infinitum; it would suggest, in other words, a subtle accompanying sense or feeling of a motionless motion of timely timelessness, which could even also be, as a motion picture in slow motion, so slowly turned into such a visual image as “the evening [that] is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” only to vanish almost so “noiselessly,” “Not with a bang but a whimper.” The definite article “the” so juxtaposed one after another in such simple sequence or series would certainly carry the impact that suggests a motion that would last forever with such a tendency as Wittgenstein would so depict here, that is, like “a visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity” and “infinitely long rails [that] correspond to the unlimited application of a rule”;150 it would certainly even suggest, furthermore, how the “nymphs” would be gone forever to leave behind The Waste Land laid completely further wasted, regardless of whether or how the “nymphs” could be understood as the part of the all-inclusive vitality of a mighty city and life itself as Carl Sandburg so defiantly depicts in his eponymous poem “Chicago,” which comes in such a sharp contrast with William Blake’s “London” especially in terms of each poem’s depiction of “nymphs” so ironically as the indispensable iconic images of the different destiny of each city. Certainly, with the lines that indicate how “most through midnight streets,” one only hear “[. . .] the youthful harlot’s curse / Blasts the new born infant’s tear, / And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,” Blake’s “London” is by no means compatible with Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” especially in terms of vitality and hope of life that Sandburg’s “Chicago” presents itself with in spite of the visible presence of “nymphs” as “painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.” Clearly, “nymphs” here at least suggest various interrelated meanings; their symbolic meanings could vary from the angels-like nymphs who bless the city to the prostitutes who remain as only fitting substitutes of the departed city-blessing nymphs who are no longer in favor of the city that falls so irreversibly into debauchery. Therefore, with the departure of the nymphs as angels and even as prostitutes, it means how swiftly or hopelessly the city is decaying and dying in ways as utterly unbearable not only for the nymphs as angels but even for the nymphs as the substitutes for the angels. The departure of even the ignoble “substitutes” of the nymphs as the city-blessing angels means clearly the eventual departure of spirit, hope, and even bare possibility of existence. The definite article “the” used in this way would even suggest not only the potential power of nominalization so inherent in each of function words, such as in itself, but also the compatible power of verbalization in suggesting how

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things so itemized would also appear to be simultaneously set in a motionless motion in such a way as to suggest the timely timeless of time in a motionless motion in ways so characteristic of both The Waste Land and Four Quartets, however obviously so different, each in its own, but still so “genetically” related, ways. Everything depicted with the use of the definite article in this way makes the scene, in other words, so alive as to be at once so perspicuously real and surreal to appear like a piece by Salvador Dali. Furthermore, this use of the definite “the” in the context even reveals the power of personification of the “perceiving I”’s all-absorbing “transparent eyeball” that would take in or itemize so objectively every single detail in ways as if utterly nonchalant, but, at the same time, suggests a deeply disturbed mood or emotion of disbelief, dismay, or denial. The intensified anxiety so suggested in the text of The Waste Land, such as the scene above, could, for instance, even appear subtly compatible with what Maria Rainer Rilke reveals through the panther of his eponymous poem, in which the panther that “paces in cramped circles, over and over / the movement of his powerful soft strides / is like a ritual dance around the center / in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.”151 The “perceiving I” as such a nameless chameleon-like single-protagonist so inherent in the scene of the above lines would certainly often, not without a subtle sense of irony, transform himself, quite so performatively, from a detached observer into the very center of the action that he observes. He would become, in other words, so performatively or empathetically becomes the panther he observes while maintaining himself as the detached observer at the same time. Indeed, he thus perceives everything of the scene so objectively but his nonchalant observation or perception vividly personifies himself in turn.152 These initial lines could then even suggest at once an objective surmise by someone else, such as a long-range lens camera holding a person who tries to look into his targeted persona’s state of mind in a manner somewhat reminiscent of a curious but impartial spectator with imagination in ways as Adam Smith would so emphatically emphasize;153 the spectator could then, at the same time, immediately also become the very “center”; he would become, in other words, at once the observer of how “in [the center] a mighty will stand paralyzed” and the “mighty will” itself through everything he observes or everything that occurs so rhythmically “like a ritual dance around the center.” The scenes indeed thus concur in ways as the definite article “the” might so indicate by means of its contextually enlivened inherent power of nominalization and verbalization. With the definite article “the” used in this way, the “perceiving I” therefore becomes simultaneously the detached observer of the scene or the fact that “the nymphs are departed” and the very object or action of the scene he empathetically observes.

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THE INVISIBLE AND THE TRIVIAL THAT PERFORM “UNNERVING SPLENDOR” AND “DAEMONIC ELOQUENCE” AS “POETIC ACROBATICS” ON “SAFETY NET” So could the cases of function-words-mediated “intermediary-sensation” be observed in this particular passage, below, as singled out by Harold Bloom to illustrate what he calls as Eliot’s “exacerbated sensibility.”154 For Bloom, it is “only [such] a genius [who] could have given us this unnerving [verbal] splendor,” with which “as though Eliot had assimilated Bram Stocker’s Dracula to Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ or Maud, with a touch of Oscar Wilde’s Salome thrown in” all through his “daemonic eloquence [that] will not have faded away.”155 Here is, for instance, the passage that Bloom refers to with italics added: “A woman drew her long black hair out . . . / And fiddled whisper music . . ./And bats with baby faces . . . / Whistled, and beat their wings / And crawled head . . . down a / blackened wall / And upside down . . . / Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours /And voices singing . . . empty cisterns and exhausted wells” (WL V, i). Even this brilliant show of genius with such “unnerving [verbal] splendor” and “daemonic eloquence” that Bloom holds so much in awe, however, as will be discussed further in the following chapters, is in fact so surreptitiously and therefore also so serendipitously substantiated by the resonant verbal flows created through the invisible but essential agency of the often too “insignificant” to be noticeable function words and phonemes as italicized. These resonant verbal flows undoubtedly allow the poetic message to be delivered in ways as variably through mere narration as through such “speech acts” that would “act out” every flow of words so naturally from inside out beyond any restraining Procrustean form; they would certainly turn any of these “formal elements, which [otherwise] impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation” into as much actively representing elements as “imaginable” be they “meaningless” function words or too trivial to be noticeable phonemes, even if not necessarily in ways as “radical” as that of E. E. Cummings in acting out his poetry. Therefore, as indicated by the lines that Bloom singled out to show Eliot’s poetic genius, this “hidden” way of using function words or phonemes would thus indeed turn all these “formal elements,” each and every one of them, from being merely “meaningless” or even often meaning-obstructing nonpresentational factors into the crucial sensemaking or meaning-acting elements; it thus undoubtedly makes every single verbal and phonemic element count or work in this way that then truly speaks for Eliot’s “unnerving [verbal] splendor” and “daemonic eloquence,” par excellence. Therefore, with this otherwise not so readily noticeable hidden agency of function words and phonemes thus further understood, does not this case of

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verbal transformation further reveal the same magic power of the text of The Waste Land as deeply interpenetrated void of living cultural ecologies that would absorb and turn even such gibberish as “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” into a meaningfully performative message of a farce-turning moment of royal grandeur? Is it not so equally powerful, inasmuch the same way as, through the same kind of vivid performance, in making this sheer nonsensical sounding “O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—” so meaningfully performative in communicating about the striking ironical scenario of incommunicability? So fruitfully explored first in The Waste Land and then culminated in Four Quartets, this performative power of language along with all the function-words-mediated “intermediary sensation” invoking verbal flows does make The Waster Land not only genuinely be, a posteriori, but also truly mean, ad infinitum. Does it not thus so ironically contradict but complement meaningfully Archibald MacLeish’s modernist view of poetry as he so proclaims in “Ars Poetica”? Together with this nonsenses-performatively turning power, this function-words-mediated narrative pattern with all its “from inside-out” fluidity therefore appears further instrumental in making The Waste Land truly of “poetry.”156 This phenomenon should also explain why The Waste Land could still often sound as much fluidly rhythmical as Eliot’s other major poetic works, even sometimes appearing so compatible with Four Quartets, which is indeed such a piece so characteristic of Eliot’s “virtuoso mastery of verbal music,”157 no matter how the text of The Waste Land is literally so “overloaded” with all these hard to understand or slow to be decoded allusions, if ever. In this regard, The Waste Land could certainly often remind us of Four Quartets as to how there are no other better venues elsewhere for us to understand any genuine heart-touching feeling in poetry but in the text itself, that is, from within the meaningful verbal flows themselves. However adequately the term “symphonic tapestry” could thus be often used to suggest the synaesthetic quality of Four Quartets, the very term could be equally applicable here, especially in terms of the performative and participatory nature of language as it is so characteristically explored in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets.158 Regardless of how often such a term would, in other words, “remind[ ] us of the frequency in this type of argument of the association between visual and musical harmony,” it is certainly clear that ‘“the Quartets’ emphasis on musical form” is also quite noticeably there in The Waste Land, if such an emphasis in Four Quartets is indeed not only self-evident but also, as Steve Ellis claims, “entirely consistent with the visual arts correlations.”159 Even with its focus more or less on the visual quality of the text rather than on the “virtuoso mastery of verbal music” as in ways so characteristic of Four Quartets, the function words-mediated and “intermediary sensation”arousing contagious power of verbal music as it is often so manifested in

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shaping the text of The Waste Land must also be utterly undeniable; it is particularly the case as regards how the power of verbal music radiates and resonates so emotionally from inside out in the live context of The Waste Land by means of the performative and participatory function of language, which often appears so serendipitously explored in the poem with the invoked “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” even through the meaningfully performing or performative “nonsenses,” such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.”160 As will be discussed further, even immediately in the first part, the text of The Waste Land gives the suggestion of how the performative and participatory nature of Eliot’s poetic language would come into full display not only in the rest parts of The Waste Land but also in Four Quartets as its utmost fruitful culmination. As a matter of a fact, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, the narrative pace is often thus truly adjusted in terms of how many function words are used, in what positions or vicinity, through what repetitive simple pattern, and in what frequency and variation in ways as Eliot himself so acknowledged as “[has] been working in a method of repetition and variation [as] lately” as around October 6, 1924, in a note to Jane Heap.161 Again, this scenario could certainly also be understood in terms of whether or how the traditional syllables-counting approach along with the strict end rhyme patterns would no longer be as much fitting as usual for us to understand the variable lengths used of each line in ways so pivotal for The Waste Land as for Four Quartets as the “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” the way poetry should so truly be. Therefore, as Eliot so fruitfully experimented in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, among others, such “a method of repetition and variation” built upon the function words-mediated and phoneme-sustained “form” often ends up with such particular power that would make a Chinese jar stand impeccably in its perpetual still motion. This scenario indeed indicates a fresh venue to be reckoned with. In addition, what must also be taken into consideration is certainly any possibly accountable impact of each function words-mediated meaning-suggesting pauses, stressed or not. Therefore, as much demonstrated in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, the meaning of poetry should certainly come out in this way as much naturally from within the ontological being of poetry itself as the real flavor of a dish that should result naturally from the process of the cooking itself, not from being “saladdressed” afterward. Neither should the real meaning of poetry, in short, be in any way restrained by any Procrustean type of poetic form at any time. However, at this point what could appear further revealing of Eliot’s cautious or even “conservative” character hidden behind his often radically “experimental” poetic genius would be his need of a “safety net” for all his prosodic adventures. Eliot, as Peter Ackroyd points out, for instance, “always needed a safety net, as it were, before he indulged in his own acrobatics”

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because “an analysis of his prosody . . . shows that he took conventional metrical units as his essential pattern—he departs from, and then returns to, them.”162 Clearly, “the major form,” as Ackroyd acutely emphasizes, “can support irregularities, which are justified and ultimately controlled by the underlying order.”163 Would not this “conservative” aspect behind Eliot’s radical experiments for poetic expression also be understood as an involuntary allusion to his characteristic reliance on allusions as in The Waste Land? Does it not, in other words, thus serendipitously allude to his serious reliance on literary context as “safety net” for the acrobatics of his poetic imagination and expression? Eliot once “complained, for instance, to Virginia Woolf,” according to Ackroyd, how he “could not work easily . . . because there was no literary context for such writing [he worked on] from which to draw energy of inspiration.”164 Indeed, “throughout his published work,” as Ackroyd so further indicates, “there is evidence of an imagination which received with full force the impression of other writers’ forms and language, and which was then able to assimilate them within an original design.”165 Such indispensable reliance on literary context so often across not only disciplines but also cultures in ways as Eliot’s propensity of using allusions so clearly indicates would certainly make it hard for one, as Ackroyd argues, even not to be “tempted to think of [Eliot’s] mind as a piece of elaborate machinery run on a very rare and expensive fuel,” which could however only be “derived from the work of other writers.”166 Undoubtedly, such a specific need for “context” and “safety net” further indicates Eliot’s multiple needs for psychological security or balance, such as his need for “respite from psychological isolation” especially when a literary text that he deals with could be such “deeply interpenetrated cultural ecologies.”167 As a result, “in the end,” as Christina Hauck so argues, “it is futile to pin Eliot down to any one point of view, religious or otherwise. Rather, what seems to be useful is to consider his work to one or more aims that might help explain the recurring return to religion as both theme and motif.”168 Clearly, “from the beginning to the end of [Eliot’s] career,” as Hauck sees it, “chief among these aims is that of achieving respite from psychological isolation,” which is indeed so “simultaneously Eliot’s deeply felt personal need and his perception—even diagnosis—of a wider cultural malaise” because apparently “religion offers one solution, or set of solutions . . . it brings people into a larger community and offers possibilities for communion with something even larger.”169 For exactly the same reason, Eliot also needs at the same time “nothingness” to break free from “the oppressive worry” in ways as Ben Bakhtiarynia so indicates. Certainly, “in the concluding section of The Waste Land,” Eliot, as Bakhtiarynia argues, “broke free from the oppressive worry about things, about objects and their various determinations, and the affirmed the ‘nothingness.’”170 As he was thus

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“departing from the strict poetic form and demands that had strangled his inspiration to write,” Eliot, also according to Bakhtiarynia, “felt free, almost as if in a state of trance, when he composed the final section” in ways as he confessed to Virginia Woolf later how “[he] wasn’t even bothering whether [he] understood what [he] was saying.”171 As a result, “if only for a moment without the recurring framework of Christianity,” Eliot, as Bakhtiarynia further argues, “learned to let go and just be purely and simply, refusing to cover the void—or escape the emptiness—he later confessed—he felt all his life in the midst of human experience.”172 Likewise, for the similar psychological need, be it to secure “respite from psychological isolation” or break free from “the oppressive worry,” Eliot also needs to “[m]ak[e] the ‘incoherent’ and fragmentary an acceptable poetic idiom” in order to keep alive an indispensable “locus” where the unchanging dreams of the good, old time remains or recurs along with “his poetry, poetics and social engagement [that would] meet and overlap to the greatest possible extent.”173 Similarly, by “making the ‘incoherent. and fragmentary an acceptable poetic idiom,” Eliot, as Petar Penda so argues, “succeeded in creating a new aesthetic form,” and even if “such a ‘disjunctive form’ with ‘the absence of transition’. . . at first glance, shows a disruptive and disunified cultural reality,” it, however, reveals, as Penda further argues, another kind of reality because “when scrutinized more carefully, the poem is clearly loaded with the ideology of its contrary states: order and unity that propagate no changes.”174 Undoubtedly, “this unchanging condition, as Penda sees it, “is in favor of the royalist and Anglo-Catholic politics that Eliot stood for” and, indeed, “this is a locus where his poetry, poetics and social engagement meet and overlap to the greatest possible extent.”175 As a matter of fact, it is so true with nothingness and disjunctive reality as the “locus,” the past never passes; it instead persists as much in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets; it always remains alive in the same static vision, through which there would be “[t]he evocation of the country dance with which EC I concludes . . . of a harmonious Elizabethan England with which For Lancelot Andrewes opens.”176 Certainly, the “static vision,” as John Xiros Cooper emphasizes, could be as much specific as even to suggest “the old Tory vision of a staunchly comfortable, unchanging, hierarchical rural culture which, in the discourse of Tory nationalism, persists continuously [in ‘the form, the pattern’ of] collective psyche even if it can no longer found in the real world”;177 it is therefore, indeed, “Only by the [anesthetized] form, the pattern [of the historical/political unconscious] / Can [the collective psyche like] words or music reach / The stillness [of a long-lasting ‘static vision’], as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ, BN, 5). No doubt, it is upon such locus, with the immortality of words that brings back our live memories and vivid senses of the past, there also comes back

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the immortality of myriad scenes where spirits and ghosts of the past dance their merry dances in the open field of history. Whether actual, imagined, or simply provoked, there are so many scenes in which, myriad live details remerge from the remote past as from the immanent present in The Waste Land as in East Coker of Four Quartets; all occur from behind “nothingness” as through “disruptive and disunified [worded] cultural reality.” This worded cultural reality could indeed be, as Erick Auerbach so emphasizes, often so at once awe-strikingly and mind-bogglingly emerge as “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena” from behind, beneath, and between the “intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactic culture” of a “sense-bewitching” Homeric tradition.178 It could emerge as in the second part of Faust in the ways Jung so points out as “foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque. A grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chaos—a crimen laesae majestatis humanae,” which, as in Nietzsche’s words, “bursts asunder our human standards of value and of aesthetic form.”179 Even so, as if with the all-mesmerizing magic power of words before the persona’s as much as our own eyes, all such scenes could all seem to occur so simultaneously on an open stage of life in the wild field where time dances its timely timeless dances in a motionless motion; it is the moment of time exerting its tenacious life while history appears at once frozen and still in motion at the same time when “the houses [that] are all gone under the sea” resurface here and now as beautiful and lovely as ever before; it is where “the dancers [who] are all gone under the hill” also return to life and dance their happy dances with their redoubled energy. They indeed all come back alive as if with vengeance through the unending process of verbal transformation that makes the powerful and meaningful echoes of the never-changing life-affirming “intermediary sensation”; this “intermediary sensation” would also become the “auditory imagination” as if merely through all the disjunctive, void-echoing words, phrases, and sentences, along with utterly meaninglessly repetitive use of article, conjunction, and phonemes. All these scenes that come back in life and so often through “meaningless” words nonetheless make invaluable sounds of a life-affirming message as ancient, as remote, but never disappearing as the rhythmical soul-soothing heartbeats of our mothers’; even if the message’s soul-soothing heartbeats may not be immediately made sense of, if ever, or even be barely detectable in the text, they are always there making the steady life-affirming sounds of hope against any visible sign of despair, be it of the falling London Bridge or of the obscene scenes of all the unreal cities. These life-affirming sounds are indeed the very “contexts” and “safety nets” that Eliot needs to do his ingenious poetic acrobatic; they are there inherent in the very text itself or in Michael Holt’s words, “the artifact’s being as it is,”180 which undoubtedly results in and from Eliot’s own psychosocial needs.

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MESSAGE OF DESPAIR AND HOPE AS INSEPARABLE “MON FRÈRE” With all these being thus said, The Waste Land seems to have composed through such performative and participatory functions so serendipitously inherent in our common language and narrative as if only to make us see how despair is also synonym of hope for the best yet to come; it seems to remind us of “When winter comes can spring be far behind?” Therefore, when everything functions or performs in such meaningful ways, it does constantly invite us as the author’s “mon semblable,—mon frère” to understand the deep irony or paradox so inherent in every otherwise so nonsensically sounding allusion. With all its seemingly infinite twists and turns, any allusion to death in the live context of The Waste Land, for instance, would eventually reveal as much a scrumptious vision of wonderland as yet to come from behind or beyond the wasteland in ways “Just as Saul went out to look for his father’s she-asses and found a kingdom.”181 With this particular reference to Saul, there is indeed always, as Georg Lukacs so insists, something that Saul is ultimately destined to “find [it] at end of his road the goal he is looking for: life,”182 because all the problems that one encounters would be merely “provisional and occasional” as parables of irony or parodies for “the great yet to come.”183 Likewise, however possibly there would remain for a while a despairing scene of wasteland, it would only be there, as Henry James would so suggest, “to inspire a happy coup on the part of great artist yet to come.”184 This best yet to come moment would even occur with “April [as] the cruellest month” that brings “the dead land” the pleasant lilac breeding power along with timely awakened “memory and desire” (WL I, i); it would occur even in ways as the dry empty sounds of thunderclaps might so appear as if delivering nothing but some sterile promises that bring no raindrops. No wonder, there would even still be life sprouting from where least imaginable, such as from behind, beneath, or between “the dead tree,” “the dry stone,” and the “stony rubbish”; so would there be life sprouting and blooming from underneath the deadly shadow of gigantic rocks as from the corpse buried deep underneath the dirt of a garden. The constantly concurring or interplaying messages of despair and hope so characteristic of The Waste Land could certainly be further understood in terms of this all too familiar woodprint “The Great Waves” by Hokusai. Everything so incongruous and incompatible of nature and humanity would become, as the artwork so reveals, so harmoniously wrapped up together as if by means of aesthetic regimentation. The sublime power of nature, for instance, is so vividly depicted through the great waves in enormous or overwhelmingly disproportional size and cold yellowish-and-white color. The power of nature has been so sensationalized in such dramatized waves

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or motion to be so readily reminiscent of baroque and Kabuki in style. But what is equally dramatized, at the same time, is the unmistakable sense of calmness, peace, discipline, and steadiness as suggested by the perfect sense of stillness sustained by, first and foremost, the overall use of gently curved lines. These long and curvy lines hold all the tension and motion suggested by the eye-catching and grabbing fingers like short broken lines in perfect contrasting and offsetting stillness, along with the all-enveloping yellowish color, which suggests a kind of warmed coldness. In harmonious contrast with the great waves frozen up in its baroque or kabuki like dramatic motion, there is also the Fuji Mountain on the horizon, which, however, dwarfed in size, suggests the magnitude of hope and steadiness with its sharpened and curved shape of a triangle in ways reminiscent of a steadfastly ever-present pyramid of permeance. So what is the message in the harmonious contrasting composition? Nature, after all, may not be so relentlessly cold and overly dominant for those who are determined and disciplined enough to face it down by bravely facing up to all its otherwise all-chaotic and all-destructive power, as those faceless human figures in the boat may thus suggest. What “the great waves” seems to celebrate in this regard may not necessarily be just the overwhelming power of nature, which is too obvious or too self-evident for us to see, but the easily overlooked and beautifully sublime power in these barely visible human figures in the scheme of composition. This scenario may thus underline virtually as much the same message as in The Old Man and Sea regarding how “A man can be destroyed but not defeated” as a promising possibility for a peaceful coexistence with nature. With such a possible allusion to Fuji Mt. as its “objective correlative,” we would see how the message of hope would be easily or likely missed in the text of The Waste Land as in the woodprint. Because of the conspicuous “image of destruction” and the despicable scene of debauchery, along with a life-depriving message of despair, the message of hope could be so often missed in The Waste Land in very much the same way as the substantive symbolic meaning of Fuji Mt. is frequently overlooked or overshadowed in this famous woodblock print due to the oversized eye-catching waves. However, the overlooked or overshadowed message of hope would still be likewise timely captured by readers who truly participate in the adventure as Eliot’s “mon frère” for the “writerly” reading of The Waste Land. With its reference to all the tenacious signs of life from April as “the cruellest month” to the timely promising sounds of thunderclaps from across mountains far away through the critical impacts of “Fire Sermon” to be further revealed in actual reality, does not The Waste Land still so tenaciously hold on to its innate and inalienable message of hope? Does it not still so insist on the eclipsed message of hope, however hard to see as it is? Does not the message of hope still suggest, in other words, precisely the indestructible and irreducible

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perspective of life in accordance with its own incessantly life-renewing pattern of yinyang, which is ultimately “the pattern of timing”185 as everything is, be it “on the shores of Asia or in the Edgware Road” (FQ III, v). Indeed, with “The Great Waves” as its “objective correlative,” The Waste Land gives out its own version of how “the ebb and flow of seasons of life” as much as the “storms and calmness [would timely] balance out and there is always a promise of tomorrow in the distance.”186 In this regard, one of the best ways to understand the multiple and constantly shifting and varying narrative voices so characteristic of The Waste Land would therefore certainly mean to understand them in terms of the various roles readily bestowed on one single protagonist-narrator, once again, in ways as Calvin Bedient so suggests, that is, “all the voices in the poem are the performances of a single-protagonist— not Tiresias but a nameless stand-in for Eliot himself –performances.”187 This chameleon-like versatile single protagonist does often appear not only naturally motivated by but also readily adaptable to various compatible scenarios as conceivable or timely available through readers’ evoked imagination as the intimate “mon frère[s]” of this nameless versatile single protagonist’s. The scenarios could range from artworks, such as Hokusai’s “The Great Waves,” to such diverse literary texts as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” All these scenarios therefore would literally emerge as mixed elements of the versatile voices of “parole” that characterizes The Waste Land as the immeasurably rich text of “the deeply interoperated living cultural ecologies” as “langue.” In the case with Lemuel Gulliver, for instance, he seems to have been bestowed with the power to transcend the limit of time and space and to roam freely in the past as in the present to see everything present through his personal rendezvous with the past, so is the narrative voice of The Waste Land. The single-protagonist’s narrative voices of The Waste Land vary as much as that of Gulliver’s in terms of the constantly varying circumstances and experiences. The constant shifting of narrative voice of The Waste Land’s often occurs in ways as much compatible as with Gulliver’s frequent adjustment to the variable circumstances in terms of the perspective and specific role or agency that he is performing in order to expose the vanity, vices and folly of humanity, which, however, would often not be so easily detected only until exposed under the not-so-regular or normal circumstances. So is the perspective of the modernist narrative thus explored in The Waste Land for the purpose, though apparently in the further chameleon-like and versatile roles or under so many different masks of narrative voices. What appears further mutually illuminated, however, is the narrative tendency that makes a complex and potentially infinite narrative culminate with the simplest message delivered through the echoes of the “dry sterile thunder without rain” from across various ranges of mountains far away; it is the message inherent in the sound of “da, da, da” as the triad of the

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divine voices on the ultimate humanity-preserving and hope-sustaining virtue of “restraint, honesty, and compassion.”188 So does the complicated experiences of Gulliver’s appear well rounded up in the simple message of peace as he finally comes to terms with; he certainly comes to terms with everything in the end but a few “cardinal sins” or unpardonable vices, such as being proud and lying, realizing “[his] reconcilement to the Yahoo-kind in general might not be so difficult.”189 The simple message of hope that lingers in the simple echoes of “dry sterile thunder without rain” (WL V, ii) eventually comes in shape in its richest and yet simplest “the form, the pattern” (FQ I, v) as in the last line of Four Quartets that shows as it tersely states how “the fire and the rose are one” in the end (FQ V, ix). CONCLUSION: THEME, STRUCTURE, AND STRATEGY Therefore, to sum up, the book argues, as the first of this nature, how the message of hope is inherent not only in everything Eliot depicts and deplores but also in the way he does it; it argues the case as a prosodic-philosophically motivated literary scenario of “close reading,” which is based on an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach that treats the text of The Waste Land as the immeasurable void of the infinitely unknown in ways so reminiscent of “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies.” Indeed, however despairing as everything of The Waste Land may initially appear, the great poem is as much about hope as about despair. Inherent in every possible scenario of despair, there is also a tenacious message of hope. The message of hope, for instance, is tenaciously there in every scene that Eliot deplores over; it is there in “the cruellest” and yet fruitful lilacs-breeding month of April; it is there with the flowers, be it sprouted from the corpse buried underneath the garden or grown out of the “stony rubbish”; it is there even in the “strangely” brief fourth part, regardless of how it could be simply read as a stoically terse and composed acceptance of death as the irreversible common destiny of humanity, which however suggests the naturally structured cycle of life. The message of hope would certainly also be there inherent in the sensebewitching Homeric narrative tradition and the mind-bewildering Hebraic narrative tradition, which, as Auerbach puts it, so immaculately define the Western tradition of narratology, per se, as an inseparably interplaying pair. The message of hope is even tenaciously there inherent in ourselves as the author’s “mon frère[s]” as much as orphans whether in the role of readers or as humans, if the author is indeed as much dead as Barthes so declared following the death of God so proclaimed by Nietzsche; we are consequently left so indefinitely abandoned or free and must be thus all on ourselves in

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handling the overwhelming literary assesses bequeathed to us in ways as The Waste Land so represents. Regardless, the message of hope is certainly always there in the innumerous performative nonsensical sounding allusions, which indicate so serendipitously, in foreign originals as in English, one of such frequently overlooked pivotal features as much of the text of The Waste Land as of our common language as a whole, that is, the language’s innate collaborative and performative function along with its most conspicuous narrative and descriptive functions. The message of hope is therefore tenaciously there in this overlooked aspect that makes our common language as so capable of to be and to mean at the same time, especially in poetry as the simple but expressively performative and participatory “speech act” even in the form or disguise of sheer “nonsenses.” The message of hope would thus be equally there in the fragmented lines quoted directly from foreign originals, which, as Herder would so put it, certainly carry the untranslatable but invaluable “primitive wisdom”-conveying sounds of “intermediary sensation” that makes poetry “the first language “of humanity, “the dictionary of the soul,” or, in the same line of thought, the primordial prosody of the voices of our hearts and minds. The message of hope would therefore undoubtedly be there as inherent in all these lines from the ages-old nursery rhythm of “the falling London Bridge” as from the so-called “Shakespeare Rag” or from Gérard de Nerval’s “El Desdichadom,” that is, Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie. Whether as Herder’s “intermediary sensation” or as Eliot’s “auditory imagination,” the message of hope is therefore indeed so tenaciously there inherent in the original sounds of these lines that supposedly deliver the primary messages of despair and “image[s] of destruction,” be it in English or in any foreign tongue. However much as purely nonsensical as they might so sound to Wittgenstein or however utterly “unpremeditated, accidental” as they might sometimes also thus appear, the sounds or rhythms of these lines, particularly contingent upon how we read them, could indeed so often echo the simplest life-affirming rhythms in ways so reminiscent of our mothers’ heartbeats, which always sound so familiar and soul-soothing to us all even when we were all infants or simply mere fetuses. The message of hope in this regard would also be there as much inherent in the divine sounding “grace-notes” of “da, da, da” from the Upanishads delivered by the dry and sterile thunderclaps as in the nonessentially merrymaking parodic noises of “Weialala” chanting from Götterdämmer. The message of hope is even there inherent in every function words-mediated and phoneme-resonated rhythmic verbal strings, alliterated or otherwise, made so equally, a posteriori, of the “meaningful” content words as much as of the “meaningless” function words, along with the essential but often too trivial to be noticeable resonance-creating patterns of phonemes. The message of hope,

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in other words, might be still there but remaining hidden in all these otherwise too “insignificant” to be noticeable elements, which however would often so serendipitously makes it all possible for The Waste Land to flow as naturally from inside out in ways as truly “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty,” that is, as poetry, par excellence. So alive inherent in poetry, the message of hope therefore would neither be arbitrarily restrained by any Procrustean type of end rhyme patterns nor by any rigid “poetry-making” scheme only to become merely “poetic,” or “meter-making argument,”190 nor would it be so artificially confined to all such “formal elements, which impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.”191 Indeed, often as the triumphant sounds of “ode to joy,” the Protean message of hope is as much there inherent in “the sound and the furry” of despair as in the “sweeter unheard melody” in ways so compatible with the real, ubiquitous, but invisible Dao, which could be as much so timely fine-tuned as “the form” or “the pattern” of yinyang192 that can make words or music stand like a Chinese jar so perfectly in its perpetual mode of motionless motion so suggestive of the timely timeless time the way yinyang is. This versatile message of hope would therefore be as much forever there inherent in the constant cycle of life blessed as if with a “grammar of affection” that “holds us” always so timely “In places where discovered sounds made sense, / where subjects run through verbs / to matter in the end, a natural completion / in the holy object of affections / as our sentence circles round again.”193 As much deeply inherent in the text of The Waste Land as in our everyday life, the message of hope could even emerge as a peaceful voice of midrash, which “would have us breathe slow breath / And somewhere in the room of this big house / he’s singing without word. / in brilliant passages / that find us without even looking / soon his grace-notes gladden us, / the humming mind within our mind.”194 Ultimately, the message of hope would be forever there inherent in the text of The Waste Land as the immeasurable life-affirming living cultural ecologies so full of things still for us to know or forever for us “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” Structurally, there are five chapters covering five parts of the poem with each chapter discussing how the message of hope could be grasped in one part as in another especially in terms of the major themes and concepts as outlined here. With comparable reference to the book on Four Quartets that I published previously and particularly step by step through the first three chapters, this book discusses how The Waste Land should be understood as a poetic work of its own merits but, at the same time, as an indispensable nexus for understanding Eliot’s other major works, that is, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and particularly Four Quartets that culminates with everything Eliot explores as a “warped

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saint”-turned poet beforehand especially in The Waste Land.195 Even if the fourth part of The Waste Land is composed no more than forty-seven words in one single stanza, its importance as the subtle but vital nexus or hub of transition in the poem’s overall thematic structure and aesthetic pattern is as much undeniable as The Waste Land itself in the same capacity in terms of its relationship with Eliot’s all other major poetic works. With turbulent emotion recollected in tranquility, the fourth part appears as much steadily still and fluid as “a Chinese jar [that] still/Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ I, v); it is indeed, likewise, as calmly composed in such a way even to suggest a clear-cut image not only of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker” but also of Aristide Maillol’s “The Mediterranean.” As reader’s response resulted from the text-invoked “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination,” one of such verbally sculpted allusions suggests an occasion of “thinking” over “Death by Water” for the meaning of life, whereas the other, as sculpted rings or ripples of echoes, carries as much as a Dido’s lamentation as an undying hope for peace and life upon the meditation on death by The Mediterranean, which thus also mirrors or witnesses everything of life with death as its irreplaceable vehicle or “objective correlative” in the sculpted version of La Divina Commedia or La Comédie humaine. Indeed, as Moody so puts it, “at first reading The Waste Land is likely to appear a sequence of unrelated fragments.”196 However, regardless of whether or how “gradually one learns to make some sense of the sequence, to see how one passage follows from another,” reading the poem as “straight through from start to finish” in this way, as Moody also argues, “still won’t give a clear sense that it all coheres—that it all really ‘works’” only until “when we perceive that it has a structure other than the sequential.”197 Neither, nonetheless, would this pivotal structure be readily available unless we know how to “hold [the separate passage] simultaneously together before the mind’s eye” rather than “taking them in their simple sequence, one after another”;198 nor would we, literally until then, in other words, be able to see “how [the separate passage] may form an arrangement in space more complex than any possible in time alone.”199 The complexity of the scenario could be perceived, also according to Moody, in ways as “we might think of the solar system or a compound molecule; or, indeed, of a painting,” that is, instead of “think[ing] of the links in a chain.”200 Even with the illuminating analogies from Moody, this scenario, however, could still be made sense of cinematographically, as will be discussed further in the following chapters, in terms of “montage” and “persistence of vision” as fine-tuned additional analogies for the further nuanced aspects of the related issues; it is particularly so especially as regards the subtle and vital whole gestalt of impact created upon the “invisible” pauses through the agency of function words that fuses things together by means of itemization, rhythm setting, and so on. These cinematographic

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terms often refer to the optical illusion whereby multiple discrete images become blended into a single image in the human mind and believed to be the explanation for motion perception in cinema and animated films. The term “persistence of vision,” for instance, suggests how the film actually runs with a pause by every second, however imperceptibly the way it occurs, so that it would be optically possible for our pupils to have the time they need to absorb each of the discrete cuts and to piece them together in a smooth flow of uninterrupted scene instead of otherwise a series of flurries of mere blurry images on the screen. Likewise, contrary to our impression, the meaning of reading could equally be understood as realized not exactly through the actual incessant, nonstop motion but through the imperceptible mediation of pauses for pensive pondering from time to time.201 As will be discussed in chapter 4, this verbally sculpted vivid auditory image of “Death by Water” would even often appear to pose such a critical challenge to the classical concept of beauty and charm that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing argues in Laocoon: An Essay on Limits of Painting and Poetry. Apparently, with the vivid images of the sea so meaningfully painted or sculpted in words, everything likewise painted or sculpted and associated with it in the worded world of The Waste Land would not only seem to move but also often tend to stand impeccably clear-cut, palpable, and utterly motionless in motion at the same time as a special still-life painting or a piece of statue in its utmost being of serene immobility. Consequently, the vividly sculpted image of the sea would undoubtedly suggest charm “by changing beauty into charm” if “charm,” as Lessing so defines it, is indeed “beauty in motion”; it however still remains at the same time as such perpetually “transitory beauty” as if sculpted so perfectly still in motionless motion and therefore always evokes our “desires to see [it] again and again” however much beauty and charm may not seem compatible with each other as Lessing so insists.202 Thus, aesthetically or synaesthetically in “the form, the pattern,” the fourth part often appears as a mini version of the exquisite Four Quartets especially “Burnt Norton” in terms of its classicistic style of austerity. This is indeed the miraculous “form” or “pattern” that can even make words and music stand so impeccably, like a Chinese jar, in its perpetual still motion. Therefore, quite obviously, the importance of the fourth part, as matter of fact, is almost as much self-evident as imaginable; it is literally made of “the only passage,” which is, as Calvin Bedient emphasizes, “that Pound found beyond improvement” as it “now serves as the whole part 4.”203 Besides, according to Robert Crawford, “Tom seemed minded to cut all the ‘Death by Water’ section, and wondered if each of his poem’s ‘four parts’ might appear in successive issues of the magazine” without it.204 “Death by Water,” as Moody sees it, certainly matters as an irreplaceable stage that “effects a gentler transition, preparing the emotions for the next stages”

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and “at the same time [as] the coda to all the previous associations of water with mortality,”205 which undoubtedly means, as Calvin Bedient sees it, the irreplaceable preparation for “both the protagonist’s and the reader’s emotions.”206 Important as it is, would it not possible then for the brief but vital fourth part of The Waste Land to be further adequately understood through the additional allusions as likely from its readers as Eliot’s inspired “mon semblable,—mon frère”? Therefore, in addition to Rodin’s “Thinker” and Aristide’s “The Mediterranean,” would it not be equally possible for the fourth section to be further made sense of in terms of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 18th variation of his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini particularly as a much-needed additional allusion regarding a possible soul-soothing message of hope that the piece of rhapsode so subtly suggests? Would it not also be possible for the fourth part to be made sense of through “Avec Maria” of Pietro Mascagni Cavalleria Rusticana as the indispensable “intermezzo” for The Waste Land? Likewise, would not the fourth part be even possibly further appreciated in a comparative parallel with the second movement of “Moonlight Sonata,” especially with regard to the pivotal role of the “strange” movement in occasioning a crucial but somewhat “odd” transition, which nonetheless fits perfectly Beethoven’s quite unconventional piece with its unconventional slow-medium-fast structure inasmuch the same way as the fourth part fits The Waste Land? Would it not, in other words, even be likely understood as an indispensable moment for a pensive pause for some special “intermediary sensation” inherent in the poem but otherwise possibly missed, even if the fourth part would often appear so strangely or so meaningfully out of tune with the overall composition of The Waste Land? Would it not also be thus intended as another special occasion necessary for “linguistic alienation in The Waste Land,” which, indeed, as Gareth Reeves would so emphasize must “go[ ] hand in hand with linguistic attraction” because, for better or worse, we could be as much ‘fascinated by what sounds strange’ as we are fascinated with what sounds familiar.”207 The fourth part could indeed be such an irreplaceable “paradox” as regards how “in their utter foreignness, at once alienating and compelling, [there] lies their significance,” especially in terms of the overall gestalt impact that the text of The Waste Land would thus yield on us.208 However, as a special culminating version of “ode to joy,” the message of hope then resonates for the last time in the fifth part, especially in the five juxtaposed allusions in English (modern and “Shakespearean”), Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit, which concludes the last part as well as the whole text of The Waste Land so symphonically jazz-like in ways often reminiscent of “Rhapsody in Blue.” As to be further analyzed in detail in the last chapter, both in sounds and in meaning, these five juxtaposed pieces of allusions together bring us a resonating note of triumph; each in its own tune

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as in its own native tongue, they instantly ignite our instinctive life-grabbing “intermediary sensation” as Herder would so reckon with it; they would also thus, in other words, timely awaken from within us our intuitively meaninggrappling “auditory imagination” as Eliot himself would also consider it this way. Therefore, to be truly reflective of the meaningfully resonant and soulful message of The Waste Land, all the chapters will make good use of allusions in this text-inspired way to dig further into the immeasurably rich void of The Waste Land so vividly reminiscent of “deeply interpenetrated [as] the living cultural ecologies”; all the chapters, in other words, would stay actively “engage[ed] in what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing [narrative strategy]” and with whatever pivotal concepts that they need to repeat as frequently as necessary.209 This is because while I do try to avoid being redundant or repetitious throughout the book, I do, however, also somewhat follow Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle’s examples, making “no attempt to avoid redundancy or repetitiousness where [they] felt that this would assist the reader” such as myself in following the analysis or argument.210 Likewise, the key notions, such as “mon semblable,—mon frère” and void as “langue” or as “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies,” would also be repeated, whenever necessary, as the recurring leitmotifs throughout the book in various or variable ways along with the brief mind-refreshing references to some major cases previously discussed.

NOTES 1. The phrase is adopted from Montaigne’s reference to the essayist who, as Montaigne emphasizes, could so often appear as such “an unpremeditated, accidental philosopher.” See Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, The Essays, trans. Charles Cotton (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952), 264. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 3rd ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 199, 81e. 3. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), 109. See also Johann Gottfried Herder’s Treatise on the Origin of Language, https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/herder​/1772​/origins​-language​.htm. 4. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, 2nd ed. (London, 1964), 97–98. https://tseliot​.com​/prose​/the​-use​-of​-poetry​-and​-the​-use​-of​-criticism. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. Longxi Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2016), 11. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid.

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11. Ibid. 12. This is the precise term that I borrowed from Roger T. Ames in his Foreword to Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), xiii, and his endorsement on the back cover of Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020). 13. Zhang, From Comparison to World Literature, 11–12. 14. Ibid. 15. Eliot to Alfred Kreymborg, February 6, 1923. In Eliot’s Own Words: “The Hollow Men,” https://tseliot​.com​/editorials​/in​-eliots​-own​-words​-the​-hollow​-men. 16. Calvin Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 157. 17. Curtis Church, “Foreword,” in The Golden Bough, vii. 18. Eliot to Jane Heap, October 6, 1924. “I have been working in a method of repetition and variation lately,” italics added. In Eliot’s Own Words: “The Hollow Men,” https://tseliot​.com​/editorials​/in​-eliots​-own​-words​-the​-hollow​-men. 19. A. David Moody, “Four Quartets: Music, Word, Meaning and Value,” in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. A. David Moody (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 151. 20. Thanks to the reviewer’s thoughtful and thorough observations, I have an occasion to reflect on the validity or merits of such an occasional use of “poetic and thus alluring” language, which seemed to occur in ways so naturally then and did not even allow me to have any second thought or afterthought of its use particularly in terms of its possible impact in relation with the book’s overall narrative effect. Here is what the reviewer acutely observes, as indicated by “The beginning of the subchapter titled The Waste Land as Wetland and Reading as Wading or IslandHopping across Swamps is rather poetic and thus alluring. However, this style is not consistent throughout this book and the poetic is succeeded by the technical language. Perhaps this discrepancy should be made less obvious.” Even if it was not purposefully intended to be so figurative or “poetic,” such a figurative description does seem to enable me to express my actual experiences while reading The Waste Land particularly in comparison and contrast with that of reading Four Quartets. The poetic expression occurred so naturally in shifting myself from an analytical mode of expression to the emotive mode of expression; my narrative seems to shift gear so automatically at the critical moment when the pure analytical or “technical language” apparently could not enable me to express what can “only be shown, not said,” as Wittgenstein would thus put it here through Bertrand Russell as in Tractatus. I have to, in other words, rely fully on verbal images or pictures in words to “make do.” In fact, this shift occurs quite often in the book when I have to refer to these familiar artworks and literary examples to express what “can only be shown, not said,” such as Katsushika Hokusai’s “The Great Waves,” Henry Moore’s “The Two Large Forms,” Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinner,” Aristide Maillol’s “The Mediterranean,” Ansel Adams’s “The Moon and Half Dome” along with Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” For exactly the same purpose, I also use various anecdotal scenarios, which illuminate the issues that can “only be shown, not said,” such as my anecdotal conversation with Dr. Sarah Aptilon in chapter 4

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of irreducibility of Judaism and Jewry in China in relation with “Death by Water,” which occurred so accidentally or rather serendipitously on-site a private “resort” as “Paradise by lakeside.” Even if I am by no means or in any possible way to be of any school of “great minds,” as a researcher on the peculiar genre of “the essay” and author of Henry James: The Essayist Behind the Novelist, I do believe “the true wit” of writing, as Emerson would also remind us, might even often remain hidden in things of great inconsistency because “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines” (“The Poet,” 152). Meanwhile, this poetic mode of expression, however “alluring” as it could possibly be, would also enable the readers or even myself to have some momentary freedom from the relentless grip of the boring tyranny of an often too consistent mode of “technical language.” Discrepancy thus sometimes does obviously enable us to essay a way out of the tyrannical grip of “technical language” as if in a way that the persona desires in the poem “My Life Had Stood a Loaded Gun.” 21. This intricate poetic scenario regarding pausing and stressing could certainly also be understood in terms of such a live scenario, which occurs when my colleague and friend, Connie Brickner, a former Benefits Specialist of Human Resources, and native speaker of English, started reciting Robert Frost’s “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” one day when I happened to stop by her office three years ago. All occurred so naturally upon my casual reference to my work on the poem. She immediately started to recite the poem in ways so much at ease as if it were the natural voice or a poem of her own, from her own heart, so spontaneously at her own pace as if she were improvising with the poem; her reciting revealed so much of her own understanding of the poem with her own flow of emotion. Yes, her reciting, indeed, often went so melodically but not straightforwardly iambic; it sounded fluctuated between an iambic and trochaic pattern from time to time; occasionally her reciting was even mixed with a certain trisyllabic metric feet, such as an amphibrach. Regardless, all sounded so natural. It was just such a soul-humbling and soul-inspiring experience simply listening to her reciting the poem. 22. Here is also a compatible case of “involuntary verbal cannibalism” as we so often experience in the classroom. Just imagine what might happen if the life-saving pause is not adequately executed, with or without simultaneously an appropriate stress, in ways so indicated or marked by the comma in the sentence, such as “Let’s eat[,] Grandma!” I thank my colleague Professor Jeanne Murphy for reminding me of this “compatible” scenario while having our casual conversations on issues concerning students’ composition, especially the problems of punctuation, pause, and stress. Even so, the scenario may not get any better, a posteriori, regarding the possible “verbal cannibalism” because the otherwise life-saving pause with a comma could ironically make “let’s eat Gramma” simply shift from sounding “casual” to sounding “emphatic,” such as “Let’s eat no one else but Gramma!” among various other possible “meanings.” Also, for the compatible cases in the Yijing (or The Book of Change) regarding the issue of pause and stress, which could result in as serious a matter as of life and death simply in terms of the actual result of divination, see Shudong Chen, Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), particularly chapter 6.

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23. Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” 99. 24. Gareth Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994), x. 25. Ibid. 26. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness with an introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.341. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Kenner, The Pound Era, 109. 30. Ibid. 31. Wittgenstein discusses the issue in Philosophical Investigations, whereas Dostoevsky investigates it in The Notes from Underground with reference to the case of toothache. Even so, it could still be the most natural way possible to convey our actual mood or sentiment otherwise impossible through the common expression by means of our common language, even if, for Wittgenstein as for Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, it is an utterly inapt “tongue” for capturing or communicating the myriads of nuances concerning our intimate sensations of “things,” such as a toothache and variable tints of color. “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same as obeying it” (Ibid., 202, 81e) and “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (243, 89e). 32. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 218, 85e. 33. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin with an introduction and notes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 9. 34. Ibid. 35. For Roger T. Ames, see Foreword in Chen’s Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody. 36. Erich Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. R. Willard and R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 13–24. 37. C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Baynes (New York: Harcourt, 1933), 155–156. 38. Stephen Michell, trans. (HarperPerennial, 1988). 39. Nicodemus’ way was once also St. Augustine’s in giving the biblical text the utmost literal interpretation in accordance with his Machanean tradition of thinking until through Archbishop of Ambrose’s influences he then started to understand the biblical text in a balanced figurative way for a spiritual interpretation. This change of his reading habit ultimately leads him from his “intellectual conversion” to Christianity and, after so many years, with his own version of “leap of faith,” to his final “spiritual conversion” upon a seemingly mere accident in the garden hearing children’s voices of sinning, as he thus confessed in his Confessions. 40. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, 117, 48e.

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41. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 155. 42. Adolf Loos, “The Luxury Vehicle,” in Spoken into Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, trans. Jane O. Newman and John H. Smith, introduced by Aldo Rossi (Cambridge: MIT UP, 1982), 35. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 49. Georg Lukacs, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay: A Letter to Leo Popper,” in Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge: MITP, 1971), 7. 50. This is from the passage of Brhadaranyaka Upanishad translated as “Thunder [is] that divine voice [that] respects the very same syllable: ‘Da, Da, Da’—Demonstrate restraint! Demonstrate honesty! Demonstrate compassion!. One should observe the same triad—restraint, honesty, and compassion” (5.4.1;73). See Patrick Ovivelle, Upanishads, trans. introduced by Patrick Ovivelle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 51. In Either/Or as in Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard also emphasizes as usual the crucial importance of a “self”-making choice or decision but with his elaboration on the three stages of life as examples. The “aesthetic” as the first stage could be more or less associable with a teenager’s life when a decision or choice is often made quite compulsively or habitually in terms of peer pressures, social norms, or parental expectation. The truly rational Cartesian decision for oneself, by oneself, and thus to be oneself, is thus unlikely to occur until the second “ethic” stage when one grows up as a much mature person. But, sooner or later, when one finally realizes there is no way that one could truly improve one’s life by means of sheer rational decision no matter how hard one might have tried, one would then start one’s third “religious” stage with “a leap of faith” from a decision to live one’s life ultimately in accordance with the Scripture. 52. Moody, “Four Quartets,” 151. 53. Elizabeth Drew, T. S. Eliot: The Design of His Poetry (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 89. 54. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, x. 55. A. David Moody, “A Cure for a Crisis of Civilization?” in T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land. Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Michael North (New York: Norton, 2002), 244. 56. Ibid. 57. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 99–100. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Ibid. 62. Bedient, He Do the Police in Different Voice, ix–x. 63. Jewel Brooker and Joseph Bentley, Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 171.

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64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 19. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid. 68. Moody, “A Cure for a Crisis of Civilization?” 245. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., italics added. 73. Ibid., 246, italics added. 74. Eliot to Michael Redgrave, December 5, 1930. In Eliot’s Own Words: “The Hollow Men,” https://tseliot​.com​/editorials​/in​-eliots​-own​-words​-the​-hollow​-men. 75. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 194e. Here is also a similar case in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s Le Petit Prince, which brings additional light to the issue. The eponymous protagonist often complaints how dull the adults really are because they cannot see anything due to their poor faculty of imagination. For instance, he imagined a boa serpent swallowed up an elephant and then painted a picture of a boa serpent with a mount-like body. But when he presented his “masterpiece” to the adults and asked them whether they were scared, they instead asked him why they should be scared by a hat. “J’ai montre mon chef-d’œuvre aux grandes personnes et je leur ai demande si mon dessin leur faisait peur. Elles m’ont répondu: ‘Pourquoi un chapeau ferait-il peur?’” (he imagined a boa serpent swallowed up an elephant and then painted a picture of a boa serpent with a mount-like body. But when he presented his “masterpiece” to the adults and asked them whether they were scared, they instead asked him why they should be scared by a hat.) Antoine De SaintExupery, Le Petit Prince (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1994), 9–10. 76. In Eliot’s own words, as he wrote to Henry Eliot, January 1, 1936, “I have written one blasphemous poem, ‘The Hollow Men’: that is blasphemy because it is despair, it stands for the lowest point I ever reached in my sordid domestic affairs.” https://tseliot​ .com​/editorials​/in​-eliots​-own​-words​-the​-hollow​-men. See also Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000), 536. 77. However unusual as this scenario may appear here in the context of The Waste Land, it would not come out so unusual, after all, if we could take into consideration these literary works, such as Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Kawabata’s Snow Country. The language used in these works would so often appear as if it had nothing to do with the ugly or vulgar reality it so depicts; instead the reality is often depicted in such a way as if only for the very occasion of making or showing the exquisite beauty of the language itself. The language in this regard is very much like an exquisite mirror, which reflects the vulgarity of reality as if only for the purpose to reflect on its own innate beauty, which has nothing to do with anything it reflects whatsoever. As an utterly opposite case, the exquisite language of Maupassant’s Mont-Oriol, however, is made as if only to show, as a total parody by means of itself, how the world of an advanced resort community so supposedly based on idealism and liberal beliefs in modern science and social progress is in fact not as much different from the exquisite but empty language itself that depicts it; the language is

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so artificially made entirely of all the excessively exquisite verbal parallelism and hollow-sounding verbal music as it so vividly echoes in the original French text. For the discussion of Maupassant’s Mont-Oriol, see Chapter Four of Chen’s Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody. 78. This scenario of “itemization” of life hidden in everything as least noticeable as in “the cruelest month” of April indeed suggests how life could be as much tenacious as ubiquitous with its incessant and inherent tendency to expend itself onto infinity wherever there is void or space for its incessant presence and self-renewal. This way of expressing hope along with and against the message of despair in The Waste Land could be so compatible with Zhuangzi’s expression of the ubiquitous and tenacious life or presence of Dao. In the section of “Knowledge rambling in the north” of the Outer Chapters of the Zhuangzi, when Zhuangzi was asked, for instance, where dao could be found, his reply was “everywhere.” When he was further pressed one step after another for further specific examples, he gave a list of possible places or things, in which dao could be identified, such as the ant, the panic grass, the earthenware, and even the piss and shit (道在屎溺). With such replies, Zhuangzi made it very clear how life or the hope of life could be as tenacious as ubiquitous in such incessant way unto infinite as the dialogic process of reference or itemization may so indicate. This is also why Zhuangzi had no choice but to cut short at the very beginning this otherwise endless long list by referring directly to “piss and shit” as analogously the lowest possible place where dao could also be found, meaning how dao would not be found everywhere if it could even be found amidst such lowest possible things. As to be discussed from one chapter to another, the use of function words, such as “and” and “the,” among others, is often meant for meaningful itemization in The Waste Land, even if not up to such an extensive and intensive level as in Four Quartets; it suggests, in other words, the same rhetorical or prosodic strategy, which emphasizes how it is indeed not each specific case but rather the infinite tendency implied through each occasion of such an individual case that makes meaning possible, as Wittgenstein would so indicate, that is, in ways so reminiscent of “a visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity” and “infinitely long rails [that] correspond to the unlimited application of a rule” (Philosophical Investigations, 218, 85e); it is, in other words, not each specific case of application but the infinite potential of the applicability of the rule of “langue” that makes meaning possible. 79. On the issue of how we might read The Waste Land, there are compatible or relevant scenarios in the Zhuangzi (chapter 1), in which there is an interesting dialogue between Zhuangzi and Huizi, his straight-thinking logician friend, on the usefulness of an old tree and a huge gourd that the logician considers as junks. One day Huizi told Zhuangzi about his frustration with a huge gourd he owned. First, he tried to use it for a water container, but it was so heavy he couldn’t lift it. He then split it in half to make dippers, as people usually did with gourds in China, but they were so large that he couldn’t dip them into anything. Then, he became so frustrated and decided to smash them as pure junks. Upon listening to his friend’s complaints, Zhuangzi responded, “Now that you had a gourd big enough to hold five piculs. Why could not you think of making it into a great tub so you could go floating around the rivers and lakes, instead of worrying because it was too big and unwieldy to dip into things!” Before long, the logician ran into another problem because he could not make anything out of an enormous 500-year-old tree. It

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was simply too old and too big for anything he had planned for. Again, he called the tree a piece of junk and wanted to cut it down. Zhuangzi’s response to the issue was simple. He asked his friend to sit down and relax under the tree and see what perfect shades and shadows only this piece of the “old junk” could provide for him. For Zhuangzi, there was nothing wrong with either the gourd or the tree but his friend’s mind, because he still has a lot of “underbrush” in his head! For Zhuangzi, his logician friend is indeed too logical with his narrow and fixed point of view to see and understand life around him. He simply needs a little flip of his mind to be creative with himself and then with everything else in the world. As indicated by the dialogue, self, community, and ecology, undertaken in the light of Daoist ideas, may also inspire creativity for us to find the treasure in the trash through the inspirational mediation of nature. 80. Bertrand Russell, “Introduction,” in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, ed. Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), x. 81. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of Human Sciences, trans. Les Mots et les choses (New York: Vintage, 1970), 235. 82. Rolland Barthes, The Pleasure of Text, trans. Richard Miller, Reissue edition (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 42. 83. However influential as his awe-striking intellect is, what often appears most appealing of Wittgenstein is his acute, no-nonsensical, and even often quite powerfully “commonsensical” observations for those who often read him. So should our understanding of the scenario be benefited from Wittgenstein’s this specific observation. “The whole modern conception of the world,” emphasizes Wittgenstein, “is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena” (6.371). Consequently, “people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages” (6.372). Even if “in fact both are right and both wrong” (6.372), Wittgenstein considers that “the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained” (Ibid.). See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 84. Russell, “Introduction,” x. 85. Ibid. 86. Ibid. 87. Ibid. 88. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5.1. 89. Ibid., 6.5.1. 90. Ibid., 6.51.1. 91. Ibid. 92. Ibid. 93. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ix–x. 94. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 117, 48e. 95. Kenner, The Pound Era, 109. 96. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 53.

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97. Kenner, The Pound Era, 109. 98. Ibid. 99. Ibid. 100. Ibid. 101. Ibid. See also Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language, https://www​ .marxists​.org​/archive​/herder​/1772​/origins​-language​.htm. 102. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 155. 103. Ibid., italics added. 104. Ibid., italics added. 105. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, 155. 106. Harold Bloom, Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner Books, 2003), 373. 107. A. David Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98, italics added. 108. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 4th ed., vol. 1 (New York: Norton, 1979), 2201. 109. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, introduced by Samuel H. Monk (New York: Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1950), 146. 110. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, the Whale, ed. Charles Feidelson, Jr. (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 336. 111. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Poet,” in The Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 152. 112. Isaiah Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays, ed. Henry Hardy and Roger Hausheer with a Forward by Noel Annan and Introduction by Roger Hausheer (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997). italics added. 113. Ibid. 114. https://www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=Tl21YlEVkl0. 115. James Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977), 159. 116. Ibid. 117. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 170–171. 118. Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, trans. S. Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), 148. Actually, neither would the very emphatic declaration of the death of God by Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ and Thus Spoke Zarathustra nor would the equally radical proclamation of the death of the author by Barthes ever possibly rule out (or is meant to rule out) the undeniable importance and vital relevance of both. Indeed, often, quite ironically, as Milton does so in vain trying to “justify the ways of God to men,” so does such denial of God and author could only result in further confirmation of the undeniability of the very relevancy of object each tries to deny. If things are truly so unimportant, trivial, or utterly irrelevant, what is the point for each to make such an effort even to bother about denying it in the first place? What both Nietzsche and Barthes actually did deny therefore is only our often very narrow and sometimes quite misleading and

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unduly mind-confining dogmatic concept of God and Author as Albert Einstein so indicates in his brilliant discussion on the issues in Ideas and Opinions. Indeed, why does “God’s way to men” need to be justified in the first place if it is already so selfevidently just to anyone who holds no doubt whatsoever about it with Milton himself included? 119. Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, 160. 120. Ibid. 121. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, ix–x. 122. While Friedrich Nietzsche declared the death of God and Roland Barthes proclaimed the death of author. Either way, it means that we are thus left very much on our own to figure out our ways of being in the real world as in the worded world; we no longer have any presumed authorial intention to rely on, nor do we have a “clear and acknowledged terminus” to resort to whether it be regarded as an ultimate divine authority or the logically undeniable “the first mover.”* With the proclaimed death of God and author, we would thus find ourselves, so all of a sudden, overloaded with the backbreaking responsibility that comes with our risk-taking freedom to dance to our own tune, a posteriori, even if we would no longer need to try as exclusively and as hard to make sense of everything we read in terms of the presumed authorial intention, a priori, in ways as Milton does trying to “justify the ways of God to man.” However, even with such proclamations, neither Nietzsche nor Barthes literally mean what they say but mainly try to emphasize quite figuratively how our traditional perception of God as “someone” who would micromanages everything as Yahweh in Hebrew Bible would be as much outdated as a micromanaging author as the ultimate authority for meaning of whatever we read. In their due place, there should be only room for an Aristotelian type of God, who would simply sit back after his work of creation is completed to leave humanity alone to deal with the world by applying the power of all their faculties created for the purpose. This would be inasmuch the same way as Barthes would wish to leave readers alone to handle the worded world through their own “writerly” initiative instead of depending so “readerly” on the author as the God-like authority or as the ultimate source of reference for truth. Such a way for truth is already hermeneutically proved impossible especially in terms of the “slippery” nature of human language and the irrevocable limit of logic in ways as Wittgenstein has so significantly investigated along with Nietzsche’s likewise efforts in “reevaluating all the values,” including so many other compatible efforts initiated by a significant number of distinguished modern minds, such as Mikhail Bakhtin and T. W. Adorno. *For St. Thomas Aquinas as much as for Isaac Newton, because “whatever is in motion must be put in motion by another . . . [t]herefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other; and this everyone understands to be God” (Summa Theologica, Second and Revised Edition, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920). Here is also its online version http://web​ .mnstate​.edu​/gracyk​/courses​/web​%20publishing​/aquinasFiveWays​.htm. For a different and more recent translation of the same passage, see St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, trans. and ed. Paul E. Sigmund (New York: Norton, 1988), 30. Furthermore, “the whole modern conception of the world,” as Wittgenstein sees it, “is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of

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natural phenomena” (6.371). Consequently, “people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages” (6.372). Even if “in fact both are right and both wrong” (6.372), Wittgenstein considers that “the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained” (Ibid.). See Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.371–6.372. 123. Different from Jacques LeClercq’s still quite refined 1958 version, which is, as quoted here, readily available online now, “ennui” is translated as “boredom” in Richard Howard’s 1982 version, even if the French word means more than the English word could adequately cover. This is probably why “ennui” is left not translated in James McGowan’s 1993 Oxford Press version. For the obvious and subtle differences of each translation, see respectively Jacques LeClercq, Flowers of Evil (New York: Peter Pauper Press, 1958), Richard Howard, Les Fleurs du Mal. The New Translation (Boston: David R. Godine, 1982), and James McGowan, The Flower of Evil. A New Translation with Parallel French Text. Translated by with Notes by James McGowan. With an Introduction by Jonathan Culler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Also, in both Howard’s and McGown’s version, “mon frère” is translated as my twin,” which sounds like a more “intimate” version than “brother” at least in terms of how twins would probably be more likely in sharing with each other or bearing something in common even genetically than mere brothers as it might be the case as both Baudelaire and Eliot would likely emphasize in this regard. 124. Montaigne, The Essays, 264. 125. Karl Shapiro, Essay on Rime (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1945), 42. 126. Seymour Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), 56. Here Chatman offers a good account regarding how abstraction through nominalization in James maintains “action” in an “actionless” way, motion of immobility, or descriptiveness without describing. Strictly speaking, abstraction is an act, not an entity, the act of classification, not the ensuing product, the general or superordinate class itself. The feature abstracted, since it is a property of an object, is an adjective, for example “equine” or “horsey.” But we can entitize the property or aspect by a simple grammatical conversion, nominalization of the adjective; thus, it is common usage to extend “abstraction” to refer to that property or aspect as a thing in itself: “equinity” or “horsiness.” The adjectives from which these nouns derive are conceived as representing qualities still in the object nouns they modify: in “equine animal,” “equine” is not yet an abstract word (in the strict sense) since it has not yet been removed from the object to which it is attributed. Hence, not adjectives, but their nominalizations are the only really “abstract” words. The same can be said of verbs, since these are also attributed to (predicates of) nouns; thus “runs” in “John runs” is not abstract in the sense that “running” is. (1972, 4)

127. G. Rostrevor Hamilton, The Tell-Tale Article: A Critical Approach to Modern Poetry (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1949), 40. 128. David Trotter, The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry (Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 113–124.

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129. Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Hopkins Studies in Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), 153. 130. Steve Ellis, The English Eliot: Design, Language and Landscape in Four Quartets (Routledge, 2015), 146. 131. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2.1. 132. Brooker and Bentley, Reading the Waste Land, 171, italics added. 133. Ibid., 2.122.11. 134. Ibid., 2.11. 135. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 117, 48e. This is exactly the case, which could also be made sense of in terms my students’ comments on Ansel Adams “The Moon and Half-Dome.” For Lisa Ontiveros of my Humanities 122–354 online class of Fall 2021, for instance, “Even though the mountains, the sky, the moon, that are in the image ‘exist’, they exist in a space. This image creates that space in the mind of the viewer, thus creating something that does not exist in the viewer’s reality at that moment.” Therefore, this “magnificent work of God” thus indeed exists only in the indispensable but invisible framework of space; it could exist, in other words, only as much in this timed and spaced or “timely spaced” reality in the mind of artist’s as in the mind of viewer’s. If the piece is indeed such a “magnificent work of God captured by man,” as Chris Emerson so put it, as a student in my Humanities class of Fall 2001 (MWF1:00). 136. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4, italics added. 137. Ibid., 2.1513. 138. Ibid., 2.1514. 139. Ibid., 4.025. 140. Ibid., 4.025. 141. William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 95. 142. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.025. 143. Ibid., italics added. 144. Ibid., 4.002. 145. Ibid., 4.001. 146. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” New German Critique, 32 (1984): 169. 147. Harold Bloom, Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994), 193. 148. Eilis, English Eliot, 52. Thanks to the postmodern thinkers, such as Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this issue of humanity’s limited control over the infinite autonomous power or potential of language and linguistic/poetic forms has become increasingly clear. Humanity in control of language could also thus often means humanity in the control of language. 149. Adorno, “Essay as Form,” 169. 150. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 218, 85e. 151. Maria Rainer Rilke, “Panther,” in Western Literature in a World Context, vol. II (New York: St. Martin, 1995).

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152. So is this another supreme case of personification with the total absence of the “author” or through the “participatory absence” of a highly performative language in the “disguise” of a sheer objective observation, if Ansel Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome” could be taken into consideration as a relevant comparative reference. In this famous piece, Adams appears so fully personified as if in a perfect self-portrait with himself in full presence, even if he is literally not present at all in this pure portrait of nature as “the magnificent work of God captured by a man” as so admired by Chris Emerson, a student in my Introduction to Humanities class (MWF 1: 00, Fall 2001). Indeed, as Adams himself so suggests how he is always there in all his own works as the person he fully is, the piece undoubtedly displays all the possible “virtues” of him as the person who, as an artist, captures the “magnificent work of God,” such as all his passionate love of nature, his almost unsurpassable patience, endurance, faith in what he is looking for, and his all-time readiness and quickness as an excellent “hunter” of the fleeing moment of nature. Adams’s acute sensitivity or aptitude for composition as a trained former musician with everything that flows and flies does also reveal itself significantly in the making of this visual composition. In addition, Adams must be an “idealist” and an “opportunist,” par excellence, to capture “the magnificent work of God,” according to Sean Nix and Ashley Carter, two students both of my Introduction to Humanities class (MWF 10: 00, Fall 2017) respectively. Indeed, as we often discuss in class, as an artist the way as he really is, Adams must be a person of passionate love of nature. He must also be as patient as Job. He must equally be a person who has enormous faith in what he is doing. It is simply because what he is so patiently waiting for may never show up, regardless of how he has already been hiking around in the area for three years in order to see his imagined ideal image finally appear somewhere there. He must also have the real eye or sensitivity for timing as regards the perfect composition as graspable from the floating and fleeting moment as from the rhythmic pace of “yinyang,” which is ultimately “the pattern of timing” (Robin Wang, Yinyang: The Way of Heaven and Earth in Chinese Thought and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138). Adams’s professional training in music or piano does, as he so acknowledges himself in his autobiography, give him the good ear and eye for timing. Finally, “readiness is all,” as Hamlet so says, and the artist must also know when and how to “pull the trigger” or “push the button” with the perfect timing to eternalize the instant so that we can, thanks to him, enter the same river twice or as many times as we want with this piece of artwork or we can thus make our life worth living by simultaneously examining and living it at the same time in ways otherwise utterly impossible. What Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome” reveals or exemplifies is therefore literally a poetical moment of a pictorial vision; it captures serendipitously a synesthetic and serene state of “being” or a surreptitious process of “becoming” when everything audible also becomes simultaneously visual and vice versa. In fact, I cannot really count how many times while listening to Miles Davis’s “cool jazz,” such as his “Blue in Green,” this serene image of nature by Adams would so instantly jump in my mind, or simply the other way around, along with various and vivid images that I have long forgotten or those that may otherwise appear utterly irrelevant with one another. 153. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (London: Clarendon Press, 1991), 109. See also Chen, Shudong,

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“Understanding China’s Economic Growth in Global Context through Adam Smith the Overlooked Moral Philosopher behind the Overrated ‘Capitalist’ Economist,” International Journal of China Studies, 4, no, 1 (April 2013). 154. Bloom, Genius, 172. 155. Ibid. 156. Eliot, indeed, as Ellis acutely notes, “had declared his ambition in 1933 to write poetry which should be essentially poetry, with nothing poetic about it, poetry standing naked in its bare bones, or poetry so transparent that we should not see the poetry, but that which we are meant to see through the poetry’: in the Quartets this preference for a ‘very bare and austere style’” (12). 157. Moody, “Four Quartets,” 151. 158. For the particular argument of “symphonic tapestry,” see Shudong Chen’s Comparative Literature in the Light of the Chinese Jar. 159. Ellis, English Eliot, 17. As a matter of fact, any great literary work, especially of poetry, is virtually “synaesthetic” by nature as it often thus appears in the form of “symphonic tapestry” in terms of one of Shudong Chen’s major arguments in Comparative Literature in the Light of Prosody. 160. Indeed, by comparison, Four Quartets is so musical; it often takes us flowing or floating without even the momentary need, possibility or even necessity to reflect on what we immediately experience as if we were dancing to the music that appeals to hearts and souls so instantly in a way that did not even grant us any moment to “understand” it, let alone whether it would be ever made sense to us or after all. We are simply taken away; the irresistible flow of verbal music of Four Quartets would not grant us the possibility to enter the same river twice or to flow with it and examine it simultaneously however necessary such an examination is as Socrates so emphasizes. until from time to time we would happen to find ourselves the much-needed breathtaking sojourn on the pieces of reef, promontory, or islet by such names as “Burnt Norton,” “East Coker,” “The Dry Salvages,” and “Little Gidding.” Before we are taken away once again by the flow, it is the moment of pause for pondering pensée, for soul-refreshing idée with our all-pondering minds in retrospection through our awakened or awakening conscious that happens as much as Eliot so eventually summed up in The Four Quartets, that is, by seizing “only the unattended moment” to go readily in and out of the water as “in and out of time” (FQ III, v) in order to be or stay “conscious,” which is indispensable even just for any momentary redemption of the otherwise unredeemable passage of time. For Eliot, redemption from time is utterly impossible for “a people without history,” whereas “history is a pattern/Of timeless moments” that could only be seized by means of conscious. To be conscious, however, means not “to be in time” (FQ I, ii). The pieces of reef, little promontory, or islet thus has at least the temporarily graspable “pattern of time and motion” for us to be perched on for any self-nourishing or self-redemptive pensive moment from time to time; we only have such momentary occasion to be “in and out of time” upon the self-reassuring branches of the verbal reality, which are therefore utterly irreplaceable for self-recollection both physically and mentally. In one way or another, the numerous allusions in The Waste Land could likely also have such hidden functions for us to have our “emotion recollected

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in tranquility” or at least for us to have the fun of “island-hopping” as long as they do not lead us astray to nowhere but the dead ends or treacherous traps of swamps. 161. Eliot to Jane Heap, October 6, 1924. In Eliot’s Own Words: “The Hollow Men,” https://tseliot​.com​/editorials​/in​-eliots​-own​-words​-the​-hollow​-men. 162. Peter Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1984), 147. 163. Ibid. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 166. Ibid., 146–147. 167. Christina Hauck, “Not One, Not Two: Eliot and Buddhism,” in A Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed. David. E. Chinitz (West Sussex, UK: Wiley—Blackwell, 2009), 51. 168. Ibid. 169. Ibid. 170. Ben Bakhtiarynia, “Thinking the Nothingness: Nihilism in The Waste Land,” in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, ed. Joe Moffet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 128. 171. Ibid. 172. Ibid. 173. Petar Penda, “Cultural and Textual (Dis)Unity: Poetics of Nothingness in The Waste Land,” in The Waste Land at 90: A Retrospective, ed. Joe Moffet (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 164. 174. Ibid. 175. Ibid. 176. John Xiros Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 170. 177. Ibid., 171. 178. Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” 13–24. 179. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 155–156. 180. Michael Holt, “Hope and Fear: Tension in ‘The Waste Land,” College Literature, 8, no. 1 (Winter, 1981): 30. 181. Lukacs, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” 12. 182. Ibid. 183. Ibid., 17. 184. Henry James, “The Future of the Novel,” in Henry James the Critical Muse: Selected Literary. Criticism, ed. Roger Gard (London: Penguin, 1987), 340. 185. Wang, Yinyang, 138. 186. This message of hope or eventual triumph of humanity was certainly also immediately captured by Rachel Pride, a student of my Introduction to Humanities class (9:30 TR Fall 2010), in the passage from her in-class on-the-spot analysis of the piece as one of her quarterly examinations. My eyes are drawn to the mountain in the background when I look at this piece. With large waves crashing on the boats, I look to this mountain as [a] refuge or a promise of hope that this storm will pass. The artist used cold colors in the foreground and warm colors in the background which balances out the painting. The white tops of the crashing waves look like hands trying to pull in the boat, but the

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curved lines on the right side seem to be pulling the boat in the other direction. This painting shows me the ebb and flow of seasons of life. Storms and calm balance out and there is always a promise of tomorrow in the distance. Indeed, the great waves could certainly be as much eye-catching to be the focal point, par excellence, in ways as the huge cliff in Ansel Adams’s “Moon and Half Dome,” but, at the same time, with a possible flip of mind, the tiny Fuji Mount in the far distance could also be identified as much meaningfully the focal point as the moon in Adams’s piece. The Fuji Mount as the focal point may thus indicate the possible hope for humanity to arrive at its ultimate destination through a successful “negotiation” with the seemingly relentless nature for a triumphant navigation otherwise utterly impossible in ways as Rachel Pride so acutely suggests. In this regard, the theme of the piece would not be so much about the power of nature, which is almost self-evident, but rather about the “essential but invisible” courage, tenacity, discipline, and skill of these even too tiny to be barely visible humanity in the boat. The emphasis on the visible or almost self-evident power of nature could thus be deliberately viewed as made solely for the implicit emphasis on the “essential and invisible” human spirit that makes it possible for humanity to survive in this harsh living environment as the great waves so symbolize. At this point, the scenarios could certainly appear so compatible with such conspicuous “image of destruction” and visual message of despair as carried in the lullaby of the falling London Bridge, which however could also likewise instantly make us to wonder as to whether it is depicted in this way merely as an expedient vehicle to bring out the inherent sound messages of hope that always echo distinctly our mothers’ forever life-affirming sounds of heartbeats that we have become so instinctively accustomed to even since our remote infant or fetus stage. This scenario could certainly also be further understood along with Shen Zhou’s “Poet on Mountaintop.” The same scenario could even be further made sense of in terms of a painting that I once saw at around the age of ten in an art gallery that my mother often dragged me to instead of the movie theater I truly referred. But I never forgot the painting afterward. Of a same composition, that is, from the position of where the great waves are, there was an aggressive, meanlooking vulture with his wings widely spread out trying to attack a bunch of chicks at the corner of where the boats are spotted. Ahead of the scared and scattered chicks, there was a hen with her wings widely spread out trying to put up a desperate fight against the fast-approaching vulture to protect her chicks. As everyone knows, how could a hen in any way be a likely match with a vulture for a fight! So, what really did the artist of the painting try to say? Did he really want to emphasize something which is so self-evident if it was not for the “essential but invisible” behind and beneath the self-evident, that is, the utterly unselfish “mother’s love” that the hen embodies? Did it not thus mean how the hen would rather sacrifice herself fighting an impossible fight for the protection of her own children? In the same logic, the great waves may appear to be so perspicuously foregrounded only for what remains barely visible in the background, that is, the faceless tiny humanity in ways as much compatible as the subtle relationship between the moon and the cliff along with the contrast between the negative and positive use of space in Adams’s piece. There are of course further at once conflicting and complementary tension involved in the piece, such as between

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the themes of despair and hope, agony and triumph, chaos and order, which are, however, all reconciled so skillfully in an impeccable harmony to make the piece of “The Great Waves” a masterpiece in ways so conveniently referable with regard to our efforts in making sense of The Waste Land. 187. Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice, ix. 188. As in Brhadaranyaka Upanishad of Ovivelle, Upanishads, “Thunder [is] that divine voice [that] respects the very same syllable: ‘Da, Da, Da’—Demonstrate restraint! Demonstrate honesty! Demonstrate compassion!. One should observe the same triad—restraint, honesty, and compassion” (5.4.1;73). 189. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (New York: New American Library, 1960), 318. 190. Emerson, “The Poet,” 323. 191. Foucault, The Order of Things, 235. 192. The rhythm of “yinyang,” as Robin Wang acutely observes, “is the pattern of timing” (138, italics added). For detail, see Wang, Yinyang. 193. Jay Parini, “The Grammar of Affection,” in New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 28. 194. Jay Parini, “Midrash,” in New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 54. 195. Gordon, T. S. Eliot, 534. 196. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, 80. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid. 199. Ibid. 200. Ibid. 201. As already briefly suggested in the preface, each function word, such as “the” and “and,” for instance, could also bring us the state of stillness from moment to moment in ways as what Kawabata describes in the beginning chapter of Snow Country. Each function word, in other words, plays the unique composite role compatible with a simple and humble “transparent eyeball” that would become in the specific context so “transparent” to be transparently opaque to resemble a “window” and “mirror” at the same time; the “eyeball” thus “takes in” everything still and in motion both inside and outside from a dim compartment of a fast-moving train in the pitch darkness of night. The scenario occurs with the beautiful eyeball of a pretty girl’s caught on a window of a fast-moving night train while she was staring impassively toward outside from her window seat. The eyeball then transforms itself into the nexus or the focal point where everything overlaps in rapid succession from inside and outside; it reflects the impenetrable darkness outside, the glimmering dimness inside, the curious pupil of a man staring at the beautiful eyeball on the window from behind her, and the glittering second that occurs to the pupil and pupil in the pupil as the dim light inside glides occasionally with glimmering lamp light outside the window. 202. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 112.

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203. Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice, 158. 204. Robert Crawford, Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), 402. 205. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, 96. 206. Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice, 159. 207. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 99–100. 208. Ibid. 209. Roger T. Ames, “Foreword,” in Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2018), xi. 210. Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, The Sound Pattern of English (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), viii.

Chapter 1

The Performative Nature of Language

The first part of The Waste Land is important in setting up the theme and leitmotif for the following four parts to play as antithesis and synthesis. Indeed, if the first could be considered as thesis, the second and the third part would then also be adequately considered as antitheses with the fourth as brief but significant transition to the fifth, which certainly culminates with everything so meaning-making as synthesis. As such, the first part provides an overall guideline as regards how it, along with the entire poem, should be read with what pitfalls to avoid particularly in terms of how to read for the hidden messages from behind, beneath, and between the lines through the innumerous allusions alive, a posteriori. In The Waste Land, the allusions that make up the bulk of the text itself would so often become not only such text-enriching but also such incessantly self-deviating and text-disrupting power at the same time, ad infinitum, to result in constant and often abrupt shifts of scenes and thereby the due senses of the narrative course and direction; the scenarios occur, in other words, often so much like the scenes on the desert with everchanging landscape and thus with no long-standing landmark ever to go by. This scenario consequently further strengthens, regardless, the responsibility and role of the reader’s as Eliot or his persona’s true “mon frère” who must have the initiative, restraint, and flexible scope and depth of knowledge in handling the text of The Waste Land as constantly “intermediary sensation”evoking and the mind-enriching void of chaos. As such a special void of chaos, the very text of The Waste Land, undoubtedly, stands for the so immeasurably deep and interpenetrated living cultural ecologies with everything forever so self-renewing and, in other words, with nothing else yet to be fully sorted out beyond our given paradigm of reading. The text of The Waste Land would indeed remain as such a void of forever self-evolving living ecologies with immeasurable space never to be fully 81

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filled out, nor would there ever be any new idea of life that would, as much as with life itself, cease from sprouting up from underneath “this red rock,” that “stony rubbish,” or even from the “corpse” buried deep in the garden. It takes only just a few sprinkles of “spring rain” even in “the cruelest month,” and there would then be abundance of lilacs blooming in “the dead land, mixing” with the awakened “memory and desire” from whatever “dull roots” of life itself. Therefore, quite naturally, not only would there be the message of hope, as so indicated in the first part, as a thesis rightly set for the following parts to take on through the due process as antithesis and synthesis, but equally rightly set in the first part there would also appear various possible “tactics,” “tricks,” “knacks,” or even timely “tips” as regards how we as readers might fruitfully maneuver with or navigate through the text of the first part and then the rest. In this regard, there would certainly be the issues that concern, first and foremost, as to how the process of reading may possibly occur in ways like a business of fortune-telling, a matter of unyielding faith, or an intricate game between the text and readers, especially as regards how to handle adequately the ubiquitous allusions. There would certainly also arise issues concerning how the intricate process would still be somewhat explainable in terms of “I-Thou” or “I-Other” pattern of relationship, be it of Martin Buber’s or Emmanuel Levinas’s version. If so, it would particularly be the case especially in terms of the mysterious “other person” who often appears as if so indispensable even for the divine process of creation. The process of divine creation, for instance, often emerges, first and foremost, as such a scene of “speech act,” in ways as with the mysterious “other person” so intimately involved or constantly referred to in phrases “Let us . . .” in Genesis, that is, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), as in the Upanishads, in which the process of creation often appears virtually as much a “speech act” of dialoguing, monologuing, and/or even a “dramatic monologue.” Indeed, who the person could possibly be? Is he the divine being’s equal partner, “mon semblable,—mon frère,” “devil’s advocate,” or deceptive adversary in “The Story of Job” as in Milton’s Paradise Lost? Could he be perceived as the different versions of the same divine being like the poem’s single protagonist-narrator who often so deftly metamorphosizes into the different roles he plays for the narrative he performs? This is however the issue that does not really all that matter in this context. What all that really matter, in other words, is the very presence of the Other so indispensable for the process of divine creation as much for the narrative of The Waste Land, both of which suggest a performative and collaborative nature of language. It is this performative and collaborative nature of language that could make even nonsenses or the nonsensical sounding allusions become so immeasurably meaningful along with all other so otherwise meaningless or even too

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trivial to be noticeable verbal and phonemic elements, such as “meaningless” function words and simple phonemes; it is this otherwise so unnoticeable performative and collaborative nature of language that literally, as Foucault would so put it, makes all the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements” meaningful verbal elements instead of being merely “grouped together into a system” preset in “the order of things” for ideas and discourse, which would then so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.”1 The issue at stake is therefore not about whether there are multiple voices of one single protagonist-narrator or simply many different narrative voices; it is rather about the indispensable relationship that sustains any type of narrative voice that one could think of; it is about the fundamental relationship that defines the inseparable bond as variable as between author and reader as between the creator and the created, whether it would be perceived in accordance with as I-Thou or I-Other pattern; it is about the mutual beneficial reversibility of the fundamental relationship especially in terms of how the relationship would often alter or alternate with the mark of importance shifted or tilted from one to the other or the other way around upon varying circumstances or perspectives, which, however, could also occur due to the possible subtle change of balance in the pattern of relationship. Nonetheless, the issue at stake is thus ultimately about the performative and collaborative nature of language; it is about, in other words, how everything, to be narratable in the first place, must be “narrated” as acted out collaboratively in ways as required by the language itself and also as demonstrated in ways so characteristic not only of The Waste Land but also of the biblical text, such as Genesis. TREASURE IN TRASH: SCAVENGING MESSAGE OF HOPE FROM THE WASTELAND OF DESPAIR Therefore, how to capture the message of hope from where it might appear least possible is also the issue of equal importance in the first part as in the rest, especially from among all those not so up-beating allusions. In the rich context of The Waste Land, allusions would certainly not be just so limited to any immediately recognizable literary references, such as “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” from Baudelaire’s preface to Les Fleurs du Mal; there would be allusions as so related to such commonplace references to “cicada,” “sound of water,” and “a flash of lightening” in the text of The Waste Land. These references would certainly be taken by readers familiar with each specifically identifiable famous piece of haiku by Basho as meaningfully parodic allusions truly in the capacity “mon frère,” even if whether the references are authorially intended or not is in fact unknown or

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by no means knowable, let alone for them to be thus taken as parodic allusions. Even so, in the rich context of The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, allusions, however, could certainly be so readily further identified as inherent in each individual phoneme and word especially through surreptitious and yet often serendipitously text-occasioned verbal transformation or when they are linked together to shape themselves into such a vital “autogenerative, ‘selfso-ing’” form or pattern.2 In the live context of The Waste Land, they could certainly be so occasioned to become the special or magic form or pattern that could even make words and music stand so immaculately like a Chinese jar, in its perpetual still motion. They could even be, in other words, so shaped, in such subtle and vital pastern, as to become so naturally at once the text-occasioned and text-occasioning, context-specific allusions to make The Waste Land appear quite ironically as such a serendipitous vehicle that conveys or brings to life the tenacious message of hope, even if the poem is primarily known as the one that seems to depict only the scenes of despair. The image of London as the decaying and dying city in The Waste Land could certainly remind us of the appalling image of “London” that William Blake depicts in the eponymous poem and the apocalyptic scenes that Langston Hughes’s “Harlem” suggests; it however could still also remind us, at the same time, of the image of tenacity and vitality of life as revealed in Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.” In The Waste Land, there is certainly not as much extensive use of refined parallelism and verbal strings as in Four Quartets, which would often bring to the text the elegant “virtuoso mastery of verbal music” that so often makes words or music become so immaculately in a mode of perpetual stillness and yet, like a Chinese jar, so impeccably alive in an utmost motionless motion of timely timelessness. Even so, there are, however, still enough bits and pieces for hope as to be readily scavenged from the gibberish of lullaby and hard to figure out allusions in the original foreign languages along with the life-renewing power of nature in contrast with decaying and dying “unreal city,” all of which together also suggest so powerfully the performative and collaborative power of language that often turns nonsenses meaningful. Echoing the permissive wisdom of poetry as the “first language” of humanity and “dictionary of the soul” with “intermediary sensation”-awakening rhythmic patterns of sounds, it is these uncanny and uncouth sounds of the performative nonsenses so characteristic of the text of The Waste Land that literally bring together the dead and the living, the past and the present, not simply to reiterate the obvious, that is, the despicable scenes of debauchery, decadence, decay, and despair, but to suggest the power of life-celebrating rhythm as the unperishable forever life-affirming message of hope. This unperishable message of hope is ubiquitous as much inherent in the gibberish sounding of lullaby, such as “London Bridge is falling

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down falling down,” as in such nonsenses-refabricating “Shakespearean Rag.” Likewise, however undeniably real, there is indeed also such a real unreal city, in which humanity roams and moans like soulless ghosts living a life in sheer inertia, stagnation, and unfruitful sex of love, so devoid of passion and only remaining adrift with the unsteadily shifting mood and sense of uncertainty of destiny. Even so, there is, however, still the undeniable certainty of nature’s unhesitant pace of vicissitude inherent in these meaningfully nonsensical sounds that convey life-confirming “intermediary sensation”; these are still the sounds or the very rhythm of life that makes the certainty of death as much as the certainty of life; as the very rhythm of life, they suggest the undeniable power of death as much as its irreplaceable agency of life. The Waste Land in this regard indicates the abundance of life in a cycle that never seems to end with such a promise of hope; it promises, in other words, a never-ending cycle of life; it echoes the live sounds of the rhythmic flow of nature as perfect as “yinyang,” which, indeed, “is the pattern of [perfect] timing.”3 In ways often so spectacular, the live context of The Waste Land represents the immeasurably meaningful void of collage with “a heap of broken image,” but from underneath it, there remain hidden one juxtaposed set of discrete aspects of life after another. Likewise, from bits and pieces of literature across cultures, be it from the utmost high-brow to the most ignobly low-brow, everything appears as if so indiscriminately culled or scavenged to make a unique piece of mosaic or “melting pot” of the “floating world.” Indeed, like the crabs in Prufrock, the rats are scavengers, taking whatever they can from the refuse of higher-order creatures. If so, would it therefore not be equally possible to think along the way of how the images of the rats that frequent Eliot’s poetic world in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets should also be adequately considered as providing a model for making sense of Eliot’s poetic imagination particularly as regards The Waste Land? Like the rats, does not Eliot take whatever he can, often across culturally, from the earlier, grander generations, and uses the bits and pieces of them to sustain his own poetic imagination, which could appear as much compatible as with what John Keats calls “negative capability”? These scavenged pieces and pieces indeed often appear in perfect parallels as terse, curt, and fragmented references or allusions to be interactive with the more coherent depiction of a vulgar existence of the contemporary world, which could be so often represented by even the sound of horns and motors in the distance, intimating a sexual liaison.4 From the first part to its last, the text of The Waste Land, therefore, suggests a unique flavor of discordant resonance along with a chaotic unity, which often seems to suggest an attempt to reconcile all the utterly irreconcilable in an irresolvable jumble of meaningfully performative nonsenses, which could appear so synaesthetially expressive as verbal music and verbal images. The noticeable verbal power of

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The Waste Land should indeed be adequately thus further understood in terms of this performative use of language, which not only collaborates with the language’s descriptive and narrative function but also surpasses it in importance in such a visual and musical way. Undoubtedly, in this way, The Waste Land emerges as a poem that stands so much by itself, ding an sich, at once to be and to mean in ways not only so contrary to but also so complementary with what Archibald MacLeish so famously says of poetry. Therefore, as real “mon frère” of the text, we must see and help our own readers to see the message of hope and life inherent in The Waste Land beneath, behind, between, and beyond “only / A heap of broken images.” If we truly “cannot say, or guess” anything else beyond these readily eyecatching unruly images of destruction and ruins, we probably miss everything so essential of the text but often remains so invisible until we find ways to recognize it not of a void so devoid of hope but of a void so enriched with everything in ways as Hamlet so suggests to Horatio, that is, “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are Dreamt of in your philosophy?” To recognize the richness of the void otherwise invisible of The Waste Land as the deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, it may take no more complicated measures than this simple step, which is, as Wittgenstein would so suggest, take off the “pair of glasses on our nose through which we see whatever we look at” but “it never occur[red]to us to take them off” before.5 Once we do it as so advised, we would probably be able to take the road not taken from within the road overly trodden or to see the new landscapes in the old as if through a pair of “new eyes” because “The real voyage of discovery,” as Proust would also thus suggest, “consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”6 We may thus even acquire what Emerson calls “a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind,” which could enable us to restore “the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects” for “the charming landscape,” which is, however, as nowadays, so tragically fenced into “property owned by Miller, Locke, or Manning.”7 We probably, as Eliot himself would so suggest, also act as much as the scavenging rats do leaving no bits or pieces of breadcrumb not cleaned up; we would pick them up clean wherever they are or however tiny as they might appear while trying to make sense of the intricate text of The Waste Land, including even these often too trivial to be noticeable verbal or phonemic components, such as the “meaningless” function words or phonemes. THE ROLE OF PERFORMING “AND” Whether to have a pair of new eyes the way Proust and Emerson suggest or by taking off the “pair of glasses on our nose” the way Wittgenstein advises, for

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the specific purpose to scavenge message of hope from the text right from the very beginning in the first part, the otherwise utterly meaningless conjunction “and” would probably be where the meaningful breakthrough should start. In the live context of The Waste Land particularly at this point, “and,” as an otherwise too commonplace to be noticeable conjunction, is no longer one of such all “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements, grouped together into a system” preset in “the order of things” for ideas and discourse, which would then so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.” Instead, the trivial conjunction “and” as the otherwise “meaningless” function word or such a “purely grammatical element” would immediately become as meaningful as the way it emerges in the text, such as in the passage about the speaker’s summer experiences in the first stanza of the first part’s, when “and” is used quite noticeably in such a “and . . . and” sequence and quantity, as previously discussed, it could have the mesmerizing impact that suggests a tendency as if the process could be somehow moving as smoothly and endlessly, in memory as in reality, onto infinite, in ways that bring past, present, and future into one incessant flow of “stream of consciousness” after another. However, in reality, “and” is not used merely to move things around or forward but to make things slow down or to make one pause for a momentary reflection or breathtaking as necessary. For things that occur and rush forward in rapid and incessant secession, such a momentary pause is in fact as much necessary for one to make sense of everything as in ways as the term of “persistence of vision” may so suggest. Is it therefore not the time for the scenario to be understood in terms of the theory of “persistence of vision” in this regard? Indeed, as in filmmaking, any visual image, however as clear-cut or as smoothly appearing in motion on the screen, would otherwise not be possible, if the film is not actually run with a subtle or almost imperceptible pause every second to allow the pupils the adequate amount of time or space they need to reflect on the image as naturally pieced together; otherwise, everything the audience could see on the screen would be merely fast running blurry images. In this sense, while piecing things together in an onward motion, “and” likewise also surreptitiously mediates or punctuates the text for the subtle but vital pauses that make the text such a serendipitously hearttouching and soul-elevating “rhythmic creation of [meaningful] beauty.” Undoubtedly, even if function words, such as conjunction “and” is not supposed to be such a grammatical device for pauses with a stress or not, as the rule of grammar book so generally dictates, a priori, in actual context, such as this one and many in The Waste Land, it would often be used exactly for such vital and yet subtle momentary pauses. The momentary pauses are certainly so indispensable in making the rhythmical flow of sound and meaning that marks or makes meaning in ways so peculiar to the poem, as if all the

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grammatical rules, a priori, are supposedly to be made only for the necessity of breaking them right at this very moment for the meaningful emphasis, a posteriori. Consequently, which “and” is to be thus paused upon and for how long, with what a kind of forceful or a subtle stress or simply no stress at all would certainly become the crucial issues to result in different reading or understanding of the text, especially with various “intermediary sensations” that occur accordingly. The pause with a subtle stress on the last “and,” for instance, could certainly suggest an abrupt end of an otherwise seemingly smooth and endless natural process with a suggestive mood of impatience, relief, or reluctance to end the process, and so on. Therefore, when, where, or how to pause, for how long or with what level of subtlety to pause is certainly always a personal matter for the reader to decide contingent upon his or her own understanding of the text, once again, in ways as the case with saying “I love you!” may so indicate. No doubt, there are always so many ways of saying “I love you” including body language, facial expression, and even silence. Verbally, however, the actual meaning of the expression could vary significantly contingent upon which and how one of the three words of the expression receives a stress. As with a trisyllabic metric foot of dactyl (¯ ˘ ˘ ), if the word “I” is stressed, one of the possible meanings of the expression could sound like how “no one else in the world actually loves you but I.” When the verb “love” becomes stressed as with another trisyllabic foot of amphibrach (˘ ¯ ˘), it could then possibly mean that “I do not hate you but actually love you.”8 When a stress falls on the last word “you” as of an anapest (˘ ˘ ¯), it could then mean how “I love no one else but you alone in the world.” Therefore, it is quite possible to suggest how the prosodically significant subtleties or variations could likewise emerge from within the syntactic-prosodic structure as through readers’ spatiotemporal free imagination. When “and” would be so flexibly paused upon in the actual context to make a subtle but vital change of meaning, which “and” used in the beginning stanzas could be appropriately paused upon, stressed or otherwise, certainly all contingent upon the rhythmic pattern that varies in terms of what prosodic role it performs or acts out; each “and” therefore, in other words, must be adequately handled along with and/or against any of the preset lexical and grammatical function as regards “and,” be it suggesting an endless process, a sudden ending, or an abrupt turn for a drastic shift of a tone or mood within or across any given spatiotemporal setting or atmospheric mode. In this regard, the line “Marie, hold on / tight. And / down we went” could certainly be scanned as variably as composed with an iambic terameter, a trisyllabic metric foot of dactyl (¯ ˘ ˘ ), a trisyllabic foot of amphibrach (˘ ¯ ˘), or an anapest (˘ ˘ ¯), simply in terms of whether how each “and” is to be paused upon with a stress or not; each “and” could even be so “read” as to suggest a pleasurably smooth and endless process of routine, a heart-caressing sense

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of familiarity, normalcy, or an inescapable sense of boredom, ennui, or any utterly unutterable but pervasively parasitized real feeling of “quiet desperation” or “spleen” as Charles Baudelaire so expressed in Less Fleurs du Mal; it could also be subtly of such utterly inexpressible but endlessly lingering sense of melancholy as Paul Verlaine so suggested in “Il pleure dans mon cœur,” or the toothache-type of annoying sense of ennui as Dostoevsky so referred to in Notes from Underground. Therefore, no matter how much everything could possibly appear as much despicably normal as it is in the wasteland or regardless of how likely there could forever be a wasteland as much inside us as outside us, still there would always be the life-affirming“intermediary sensation” evoked live in the text for the expression of our otherwise unutterable feeling in ways often as subtle but vitally expressive as the case of “and” may so indicate. So could the use of the last “and” in this regard be adequately paused upon and stressed to indicate a pervasive sense of hopelessness or impotence toward, a morbid feeling of satisfaction with, and even an evasive mood of frustration about, this endless boring process of routine that would finally or never come to its end. Meanwhile, the whole scenes so pieced through “and” could also suggest a verbal mirage of montage with everything mingled together through the swift but smooth shifts of scenes that could appear as much naturally as deliberately well-measured flow of words with pivotal mediation of function words, be it of past or present, anything real or surreal, I or you. This way of understanding the conjunction “and” also suggests surreptitious verbal transformation through which the function word “and” seems to have acquired the very power of a verb in piecing things together, moving them around, mediating and sustaining any meaning-making pause for the emotion to be recollected in tranquility or to be evoked in fluid motion, movement, and mood of the flowing verbal flow. If “and” could also suggest a possible feeling of ennui in the first stanza as resulting from a too smooth and too endless routine of normalcy, the use of line in original German could add an additional layer of ennui as if life could be inescapably so “normal” or universal, everywhere; it, however, would also suggest, at the same time, something as instantly strange but fresh as what Herder would call it the “intermediary sensation,” which is inherent only in the original foreign language and would remain as utterly untranslatable as “blitz.” The “meaning” of “blitz.” so deeply inherent in the “intermediary sensation” unique only of the German word would be, in other words, instantly lost once translated as “lightening” in English. This list of such function words-mediated or even function words-turned performative verbal allusions, be they intended or involuntary, be they in English or in foreign originals, could be as much variable as “and” in the live context of The Waste Land. The “and” that links the routine of life at a different time would literally also become so instrumental

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in making it possible for the poem to flow naturally from inside out through various fluid verbal strings not confined to any strict rhyming pattern. Along with all the other function words, “and” is thus indeed used in such a way to mediate and sustain effectively the “intermediary sensation”-evoking and meaning-making verbal flows. This is one of the most crucial features of The Waste Land as much as of Four Quartets. THE INVOLUNTARY ROLE OF “AND” AS UNEXPECTED BUT NATURAL ALLUSION Obviously, along with other function words, the extensive use of “and” not only makes emotion flow naturally from inside out but also makes it often so intensively musical, visual, and referential. This performative nature of “and” revealed live in the text through surreptitious verbal transformation, a posteriori, also becomes such an involuntary but natural allusion that suggests immeasurably vast and “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies,” which indicate in turn something as meaning-enlivening and “intermediary sensation”-enriching as of a hidden void, be it called or related to as houshu 後素, dayin 大音, or simply as the “sweeter, unheard melody.” The meaning of the text would then be possibly sustained for the indispensable mutual illumination through actively interpenetrated living cultural ecologies the way the text of The Waste Land becomes or really is or at least in ways not as Goethe so often thus deplores as in Pandora as so doomed or “[d]estined, to see the illuminated, not the light.” The scene of how “and” is used in The Waste Land, could also become another perfect allusion to the compatible scenario in the biblical text, that is, Genesis. Indeed, as previously referred to in the preface concerning the cases of surreptitious verbal transformation, this scenario often occurs live with serendipitous verbal impact in the actual context, especially in “the form, the pattern” of nominalization, verbalization, and functionalization, however “innocent” as each function word thus involved may appear at the first sight. Undoubtedly, this surreptitious use or occurrence of function words, be they prepositions, conjunctions, definite, or indefinite article, would bring us as much the same unexpected but actual “side effects” in any literary text that we are familiar with, such as the biblical text, as in the text of The Waste Land and Eliot’s other poetic texts, particularly that of Four Quartets. Here are, for instance, the familiar lines as from the “Genesis” of the biblical text, that is, “And God said, ‘Let there be . . . And it was so.’ Let us make man in our images . . . according to its kind” (Genesis 1:26).9 For comparison, here is also the King James’s version: “And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so” and “And God said,

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Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” This “and”-mediated narrative would always carry a certain unexpected “side effect.” Apparently, in the biblical text, with this “and”-facilitated pattern, what consequently appears as fully conveyed, for instance, is not only the simple fact of the process of creation but also the ultimately proved erroneous feeling or the inevitably misleading sense of easiness or smoothness about the process of creation that goes on as if as smoothly or effortlessly as it is exactly planned, that is, “according to its kind.” Then, as if completely out of blue, the outcome would appear so contrary to the scenario that narrative seems to suggest with “and . . . and” pattern; everything could then eventually appear, in other words, so drastically contrary to the presumably divine plan or the involuntary expectation so naturally built upon the narrative with the smooth “and”-mediated pattern. As a result, there come these passages regarding how “God was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:6)10 and how, after the flood, again, “The Lord said in his heart, ‘I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done” (Genesis 8:21).11 This narrative “side effect,” however, is literally not hard to understand when the inherent verbal tendency could be adequately taken into consideration in ways as the conjunction “and” so implies. In fact, when “and” is used in such a way, it would inevitably come out with a natural “senses bewitching” impression as if everything could thus move on as smoothly forward as possibly onto infinite, at least theoretically. The power of “and” as conjunction, therefore, as Wittgenstein would probably emphasize here again, as above, does not necessarily result so much from its actual use as from the infinite tendency or potential implied or inherent in each of such an occasion of verbal application. The power of “and” as conjunction, in other words, is inherent in this implicit potential that makes our common language functional through each verbal application. The scenario is thus indeed very much like “a visible section of rails [that] invisibly laid to infinity” and “infinitely long rails [that] correspond to the unlimited application” of such a rule-governed potential inherent in words and in the hidden power of tendency suggested in each occasion of using them. In this regard, there is always hidden levels or layers of “blind sports” or meaningful or meaningmaking void that would yield such “side effects”; the void so inexhaustibly interpenetrated as living cultural ecologies with meanings as profound as langue, houshu 後素 or dayin 大音 is apparently “unwilling to subject itself to classic disciplines” nor is it possible to be ever grasped merely in line with any limited authorial intention or our best attention if our attention is

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so confined only to our habitual or usual way of reading. In this regard, we therefore must pay as much our unusual attention to the “meanings” from the function words as to all the literary references and allusions particularly the original foreign tongues, such as Latin, Greek, Italian, German, French, and Sanskrit, for the specific performative and collaborative impact that may occur in the live context of The Waste Land, be it intended or involuntarily invoked.

THE FUNCTION OF I AND YOU Indeed, as wonderful cases of mutual illumination that shine on The Waste Land from within its own text as such an immeasurably intricate, collaborative, performative, and spontaneously meaningful jumbo-making labyrinths of living cultural ecologies, there are not only the scenarios of the performative role of “and” but also of illuminating occasions of “I and you” bonded as intimate collaborators and consultants of one another. Together, they indicate how creation as a process of doing is unlikely if it does not simultaneously occur as a collaborative and performative “speech act” by means of verbal communication. Even if we have good reason to believe, as Calvin Bedient so argues, how The Waste Land is composed with one single protagonist-narrator, this one single protagonist-narrator, however, apparently could not present himself unless he acts himself out in ways so chameleon-like through multiple voices or with many different masks as required by what Wittgenstein emphatically calls as our “natural common language.” By “common,” it naturally means it is naturally “designed” only for the common use for the common purpose by the common humanity.12 Furthermore, as the case with the creation narrative of Genesis, no creation could apparently be carried out unless by means of acting it out in ways as dialogue as required in the collaborative mode “Let us make . . . it was so . . . according to their kinds.” So must the single protagonist-narrator, therefore, act himself out likewise at least in an I-Thou or I-Other mode as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas each so suggest. This is certainly also the way required by our common language as a natural mode of parables.13 This is the natural mode of parables that even the divine must come in term with in order to have himself shaped in the human face and speak in ways as communicable with humanity at large as Parini so argues in Jesus: The Human Face of God.14 This intimate bond or “I-Thou” relationship is apparently so indispensable even for the divine creation of the world as it is so widely suggested in Genesis as in The Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Upanishads; it is even so suggested in Plato’s Dialogue, such as “Symposium” as regards the origin

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of human love as in Dream of Red Chamber as the overarching narrative structure based upon the Chinese mythology of the making of the universe.15 The intimate bond appears so often confirmed not only through such “speech acts” but also through the “trivial” but the crucial pronoun “us” in the vital verbal pattern that defines or pivots the narrative structure of Genesis “Let us . . .” in ways as discussed above. The intimate bond therefore becomes thus as much formerly sealed as further concealed in the fundamental verbal structure. Important as they are, the “speech acts” or verbal performances, quite ironically, often, as a result, become “invisible” or remain hidden in ways as much as “air” simply because they are too familiar or too indispensable to be even ever noticeable anymore. The intimate I-Thou or I-Other bond therefore often becomes, in other words, as easily concealed as revealed exactly in ways as regards the case with “us” in the text of The Waste Land as in the biblical text; it is thus literally often concealed as revealed in such an essential and yet invisible way that no narrative of either text would ever be possible without its usual surreptitious and sometimes often serendipitous influences, regardless, be it of a divine world-making process or of poetry as “rhythmical creation of meaningful] beauty.” Indeed, as indicted in the text of Genesis quoted above as in the line from the first part of The Waste Land, what really stand out, however, are not only the performative role of “and” but also the crucial relationship of “I and You,” which could be such a surreptitious shift often between Buber’s “I-Thou” mode and Levinas’s mode, if the former could be considered as emphasizing adequately balanced relationship of reciprocity in contrast with the latter that often tends to prioritize the importance of the Other over “I.” Undoubtedly, as the case with “us,” the almost sacred “I-Thou” or “I-Other” relationship could indeed also be further observed as simultaneously concealed and/or as revealed in the lines of 132 words of the third stanza, which ends with a direct reference to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in German original following the subtle elusive or illusive shifts from scenes to scenes as from time to time in ways so reflective of the myriad nuances of relationship between I and you. Clearly, in the pivotal lines of the first part, with a shift of focus from conjunction “and” to “you,” the use of the personal pronoun “you,” along with other function words, such as the conjunction “and” and the definite article “the,” undoubtedly give the poem a specific narrative pace, rhythmical structure, and fluidity. This special use of “you” thus apparently allows each word of the poem to flow naturally from inside out simultaneously in accordance with and in spite of any given poetic form or pattern, that is, without being confined to its set syllabic counting and end rhyming scheme. Meanwhile, it also thus allows the poem to take as much advantage as possible of the natural “form” or “pattern” because it is the only form or pattern that can make words or music stand so perfectly like a Chinese jar in its perpetual still motion. This

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use of “you” in the live context here is equally crucial in assisting “and” in setting, adjusting or simply making the narrative structure, pace, and fluidity to be flexible enough to bypass and/or make do with whatever established poetic pattern that would enable it to flow naturally from inside out. However, what appears further clear is that the frequent use of “you” in the live context further occasions the crucial performative power inherent in our common language through this inseparable “I and you” bond, which becomes increasingly important not only philosophically but also prosodically in this first part as in the whole poem. This bond also appears intensely explored in this way in Eliot’s other major poems as well, especially Four Quartets, with compatible but different intensity. The frequent reference to “you” in the lines as above certainly becomes so essential in steadily bringing “I” the selfsubstantiating performative speaking power and the credibility as an all-participating and all-observing single protagonist-narrator. Such a presence of “you” would also appear so instrumental in making itself a meaningful allusion, which would, be it intended or otherwise, as in Four Quartets, become the indispensable comparative reference to the subtle and vital relationship of reversibility. This reversibility could certainly be observed and made sense of in terms of the importance of one with or over the other in ways as inferable from Buber’s “I-Thou” as much as to Levinas’s “I-Other” relationship. The comparative reference would then also make it meaningful the otherwise meaningless and often abrupt shifts of points of view from “I” to “you” and the other way around. As the lines of the first and second stanzas, particularly of the first twelve lines of the latter’s, may so indicate, the relationship shifting occasions could be so suggestive of an attempt to act out as a means of communicating the problem of incommunicability even between the most intimate I and You. Regardless, whether or not one would eventually figure out the meaningfully meaningless meanings as regards these phenomena as “you” would so indicate, “you” would always stand there for the seemingly ever-present problem or issue of incommunicability that confronts not only our worded world here but also the actual world, of which the worded world is only the significantly insignificant tip of the iceberg; it is particularly the case when the issue of the emotional and spiritual wasteland inside us is taken into consideration along with such seemingly permanent problems of our modern world, that is, “alienation” and “identity crises.” These issues certainly often haunt us as such endlessly mind-wrangling and heart-andsoul-wriggling modern versions of the ancient Cretan Paradox. Whether as verbal problems or real problems, if not until we are eventually capable of figuring them out, these issues would still remain as meaningfully meaningless in the text as part of the problem of incommunicability as with so many incomprehensible allusions that make up the immeasurably rich text of The Waste Land. Even if we would not be able to make sense of the problem of

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incommunicability, ever, we still get the sense of it through the ways as the problem is so expressed as performed, a posteriori, be they otherwise characterized as narration or description. CRETAN PARADOX AND PROBLEMATIC ISSUES OF I AND/AS YOU Indeed, regardless of how complex the issue of understanding the text could possibly be, what makes it so hard to grasp is ultimately not the proclaimed death of God and author but the real identity crises inherent in the narrative and text itself in ways as the century-long classical Cretan Paradox may so suggest. This particular identity of “I” as persona could make the text infinitely ambiguous with an ever-present and irresolvable paradoxical scenario resulting from the implicit but constant role-shifting turns or twists of “I.” If we, for instance, assume the statement or proposition “All Cretans are liars” as true and know the speaker himself is also truly from the island, the true statement then instantly becomes false because the speaker is one of the liars and the liars do not tell the truth. If the statement turns out false, it therefore clearly means the speaker does tell the truth and he then cannot be a liar. If so, the statement once again appears to be true and immediately false thereby. This truth or false circle could be thus literally turned around and around either way unto infinity or simply remains stuck in the first place with the speaker, because the speaker’s actual identity could make the proposition perpetually alive or dead at the same time. This entire scenario, in other words, seems to be related to the identity of the speaker as to whether he is a Cretan himself or not. However, even if he is not a Cretan, it still does not solve the problem. How does the speaker know about the situation? Does he learn it from his personal experiences or from someone else who could be a liar or a person who is biased against the Cretans a priori? Undoubtedly, regardless of whether the speaker is actually from the island or not, the very nature of the proposition depends not only upon the speaker’s identity but also upon the possible role that he plays as a simple truth-teller, a mere transmitter, a sophisticated mediator, or an indispensable facilitator. What remains ultimately irreducible, after all, is the very presence of the speaker along with his crucial identity, role, and “points of view.” Regardless, quite ironically, often, the more the “I” as speaker appears phonemically substantiated, the more elusive he seems to become in the live context of a phonemic symphony, and, consequently, the more it appears philosophically a thought-provoking issue-concerning content, context, agency, or, in short, simply everything that occasions or relates to the fundamental identity and credibility issue that “I” represents in relationship with “you.”

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Literally, in the actual context, the “you” and “I” could become not only so indispensable but also as much mutually convertible or reversible in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. However, such conversion or revisability would also cause as much confusion as meaningful illumination. As a matter of fact, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, especially in “East Coker,” “I” indeed often appears as pivotal as historical conscious that pivots past and future upon present as upon a piece of simultaneously memories-enriched and memories-enriching land. Pivotal as it is, “I,” nonetheless, still relies so much on “you” as “you” on “I” to be timely invoked in the mind as in reality. Whatever “I” says anything of “you,” be it identified as an individual, as a group, or even as an event, it would instantly have an irretrievable impact on “I” regarding his credible identity or even the validity of everything he has said. With “you” often appearing as the Other or as the personified consciousness or objectified reverie of “I” in the process of “a la recherche du temps perdu,” the “I” often even appears to have become merely the shadows and echoes of the substantive “you.” Undoubtedly, as it would also thus become a pattern since this first part of The Waste Land, whoever or whatever “I” would be possibly identified, its very identity depends on all the memories he has shared with “you” in the past, imagined or real. “You” brings “I” the indispensable self-constructing relationship that would sustain or substantiate “I” to such a degree that the “ I and you” relationship would even seem to transfer from the equal relationship of reciprocity as based possibly on Buber’s account of “I-Thou” pattern to Levinas’s “I-Other” mode. In the latter, the importance of the Other often tends to weigh much significantly over “I” to make it appear even more like a surrogate of the Other. The reversal of the relationship could even occur as metaphorically as “detrimental” or “insidious” as the reversal of relationship in ways as it happens in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray if the violent fatal damage could likely be inflicted on the crucial subtlety of I and/as you bond inherent live in the original. This relationship could often even seems to be subtly affected in terms of different versions in which it appears. Comparing with the German original “Frisch weht der Wind / Der Frisch weht der Wind / Der Heimat zu / Mein Irisch Kind, / Wo weilest du,” the important role of “you” in the English version as translated by Le Galliene from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, that is, “Fresh blows the wind / For home; / My Irish child, / Where do you tarry?”16 does not appear, for instance, as much naturally emphasized, if at all, as in the German original. The irreplaceable “intermediary sensation” that “you” caries as “du” at the most emphatically strategic end position in the original German text undoubtedly appears in ways so vividly suggestive of the primordial power of poetry as the “first language,” which however so quickly disappears in English translation. Gone, so irrevocably evaporated, in the English version is, therefore, all the real but utterly incommunicable

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“primitive wisdom”-conveying “intermediary sensation” or evoked “auditory imagination,” which du brings and pivots upon especially at the strategic end position, even if the end position could be on occasions as much important in English as in German and Chinese.17 “You” in the English version, in other words, causes “du” to lose its most emphatic meaning-making power so naturally endowed upon it at the end position in the German language as if of its inalienable birthright.18 Therefore, even from the very beginning stanza of the first part, this scenario also suggests the light of illumination on the issue as to why the original versions have often been brought into the text of The Waste Land directly, untranslated, in foreign originals from Italian, Latin, French, and Sanskrit even so side by side together as at the very end of the last stanza of the last part. One of the possible reasons in this regard should be obviously to keep intact all those most invaluable but utterly ungraspable or untranslatable “intermediary sensation” so inherent live in the original but would be otherwise instantly evaporated the moment it is translated into another tongue. The originals are kept, in other words, to take advantage of the original sounds in the original word order so vital for keeping intact the original “flavor” in the original genetic order. Apparently, only in this original prosodic and syntactic verbal context could the vital “intermediary sensation” be possibly kept alive for the utmost primordial sounds of wisdom and hope, which remain forever so deeply inherent in the original in ways otherwise impossible as the case with du may so suggest in the first place. Therefore, as to how many such untranslated lines from the original foreign tongues are literally so used, when, where, and in what sequence, and for what conceivable purposes in The Waste Land, this should always be the matter that really matters. We must certainly be prepared to read and pay adequate attention to the subtle changes or alternations of the narrative mode and mood in terms of the meaningful modulation and motion of different word sequences of different versions in different sounds of different tongues, be it “you,” “du,” or “tu” in relationship with “I,” “Ich,” or “Je” as the forever inseparable pair. This would possibly be the only way for us to capture alive the subtle and vital “unheard melody” often through the untranslatable “intermediary sensation” that the poetry so relies on as the “first language” of humanity, “the dictionary of the soul,” or even “the prosody of the heart and the soul,” par excellence, along the same line of thinking. Indeed, however trivial as everything would often initially appear, nothing however would eventually emerge as too trivial to be dismissible in The Waste Land, which is, undoubtedly, as much as a text of the inexhaustibly meaningful void of jumble and chaos to be further explored for the forever mind-enriching sound of houshu 後素, dayin 大音, “sweeter . . . unheard melody” of Dao. Therefore, forever to be thus so explored, as in Eliot’s own words from Four Quartets, is “[t]he unheard

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music hidden in the shrubbery” (FQ I, i) of a world “Between un-being and being” (FQ I, v) as the “music heard so deeply/That it is not heard at all” (FQ III, v). Whatever it is called, the subtle sound of music clearly makes vital differences even from where least noticeable, that is, “stony rubbishes,” in English as in any of the tongues used in the text as the first part of The Waste Land has thus already so indicated. PERCEIVING YOU AS THE OTHERIZED I AND I AS THE ALIENATED YOU IN DISGUISE This I and you relationship could certainly be further observed in terms of the famous “They called me the hyacinth girl” passage in the second stanza. Indeed, as further indicated in this passage, the I and you relationship could indeed become as variable as mutually reversible to become so often hardly distinguishable in terms of any usual sense. You could become the otherized I whereas I could become alienated you with past becoming the phantomized present and present the etherized past. Undoubtedly, even from the very beginning of the live context, there would instantly emerge many such vivid but hard-to-make-sense scenes, which are immediately of such mixed and readily reversible modes and moods, so simultaneously of the utmost private scenes between only “you and I” as from both within and without, from the past as from the immediate present; everything occurs as if so at once of a realistic and surrealistic world in ways that “can only be shown, not said,” which means, in other words, how it could only be performed, not be narrated in any sequential or logical sense as usual. This particular mercurial pattern so revealed of the relationship of “I” and “you” at this very beginning part of the poem should teach us enough how to read not only the rest of The Waste Land in the light but also Eliot’s other poetic works, particularly his culminating Four Quartets. Our understanding of how “I” and “you” relationship plays out in Four Quartets would certainly also teach us in turn how to understand it further with regard to its due impact on the text of The Waste Land. Therefore, it is particularly worthwhile to see how “I” and “you” in both texts often become not only so inseparable but also mutually reversible as regards each’s actual “part of speech,” de facto status of role and narrative priority in the text in ways as Buber and Levinas would both so suggest even from their not so exactly compatible perspectives. In Four Quartets as in The Waste Land, the “I” and “you” for instance, could appear as much mutually reversible as equal partners as if of a dialogic mode on “the form, the pattern” of reciprocity as in Buber’s version or be shaped into a rather asymmetrical pattern with “you” as the Other commanding a major role in importance as of Levinas’s scheme.19 In “East Coker,” so often “you” is indeed used instead

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of “I” and apparently dominates the narrative of the next two quartets as well. Of the use of “you” and “I” and with the entire Four Quartets taken into consideration, the four pieces, as from the very beginning, seem to have already set in a dialectic pattern of an ongoing dialogue between “I” and “you” in the respective stages of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The first piece “Burnt Norton” appears as the stage of thesis with “East Coker” and “The Dry Salvages” as antithesis, and “Little Gidding” as synthesis, which culminates in “complete simplicity” of a soul-elevating “ode to joy” along with a culminating motif of “the fire and the rose are one.” In this way, Four Quartets is also in a quintessential structure of sonata form with the first piece as “introduction,” the second and the third as “development,” and the last one as “recapitulation.” In “Burnt Norton,” the presence of “I” represents the “conscious” in struggling with time, which could often be so perfectly motionless as of a structured pattern but suggestively full of motion with all the actual, evoked, and/or imaginable detail in it. In the second and third pieces, the presence of “I” apparently is replaced by the dominant appearance of “you,” the significance of which could be understood as if “I” becomes “you”’s Otherized self especially in ways as Levinas looks at the “I” and “you” relationship. The “you” seems to become the better version of “I” either as its “soul” or the reified shadow of a higher authority. “I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you/Which shall be the darkness of God” (FQ II, iii). Even if not as structured as in Four Quartets, this intricate mutually reversible pattern of “I and you” relationship has revealed in the text of The Waste Land as much the same tendency as it so eventually culminates in Four Quartets. Again, as this same “They called me the hyacinth girl” passage so indicates, “you” emerges as the better version of self of I’s; it substantiates “I” in the process of his further becoming or metamorphosis through whatever real and/or imagined scenarios of life in the past that occur or reoccur as if all in the present through the agency of “you.” So intoxicatedly, away “you” carries “I” in “[her] arms full,” while still so freshly with “[her] hair wet,” even across the seas into the utmost remote, secret and sacred, recesses, whether in the past or in the present, from within or from without, in reality, or in memory, so beyond the usual power of language to depict it. Indeed, in this way, “you” captures and carries “I” away, in a special mode and mood of being or metamorphosing, of which “I” could not Speak” nor feel “neither / Living nor dead” but remains utterly mesmerized in silence as if so unexpectedly caught between or beyond any readily definable or regular state or notion of unbeing and being. This is virtually a state of being or becoming, which, as in Wittgenstein’s words, can as much “only be shown, not said” as the unheard music echoing so profoundly in the utmost recesses of the shrubbery amidst a world so torn apart between unbeing and being; the unheard

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music therefore becomes so meaningfully heard while it resonates so deeply with and within the heart and soul to appear so utterly unheard or even simply inaudible at all without. In this regard, “you,” as the otherized “I,” in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, apparently not only often substitutes “I” but also surpasses it in terms of priority as if “I” could freely reverse its role, a posteriori, in relation with “you” and become, ad infinitum, the deified or reified presence of “you” in a pantheistic and elfish spirit of the land as of the sea. This “I” and “you” pattern of reversal often seems to concur intimately with the process of verbal transformation, literarily through the agency of “and,” in which content words could become functionalized in the live context to assume the roles of function words, whereas function words could be nominalized or verbalized to acquire the power of content words in ways as the conjunction “and” so indicates in the live context of the first part of The Waste Land as in the rest. Indeed, as to be specified in the following sections, there are further scenarios, in which each possible relationship revealed between I and you occurs through the mediation or agency of function words as if only to make “I” the substantiated shadow or surrogate of “you” or the other way around. Besides, in addition to or along with its apparent agency in mediating the reversible relationship between I and you, the function words, such as “the” and “and,” would also often even appear to be so indiscriminately contextualized in the process to acquire the de facto power of nouns and verbs, whereas all the words, be they content words or function words, also seem to be so impeccably functionable in this variable way as long as they each carry identical or compatible vowels, such as /ei/, /ai/-sound and w-sound; they often appear so functionable together in this way as if they each literally meant no more or no less than what they actually sound in the process of meaningful verbal flows rather than what they each would otherwise so discretely mean or function as individual words in terms of their lexical meanings or figures of speech. Furthermore, with “you” and “I” becoming so mutually reversible, equally so hard to grasp is therefore not merely what they are but who they are as regards the ways they are so referred to however perfectly each seems to have an immaculate role to play. With “you” as such an inseparable “twin” and regardless of all its syntactic, prosodic, and thematic significance in the context of The Waste Land as in the context of Four Quartets, the meaning of “I” could be as infinitely variable as the meaning of “time” if it could ever be immaculately identified or identifiable as “you,” as past, present, and future. The meaning of “I” could be, in other words, as chameleon-like as compatible with only whatever perceivable scenarios as “Cretan Paradox” may so suggest. This particular identity of “I” as persona could make the text infinitely ambiguous with an ever-present and utterly irresolvable paradoxical

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scenario resulting from the implicit but constant role-shifting turns or twists of “I” with “you,” be it variably identified as an individual, as a group, or simply as an imagined or invoked scenario. Regardless, indeed, it is no doubt that the more the “I” as speaker appears phonemically substantiated, the more elusive it would become in the live context of a phonemic symphony, and, consequently, the more it appears philosophically a thought-provoking issue. This would thus become such a vital and subtle issue that concerns content, context, and agency of “I” in relation with “you” in the actual context among many other conceivable and even unconceivable meaning-making and meaning-affecting verbal and contextual elements. Still, the more there come challenges to our reading of The Waste Land as of Four Quartets, the more “fun” each text seems also to bring us along with a further revived timely timeless flow of time in its perpetually still or motionless motion. In short, the relationship of “I and you” could possibly be defined as varying from equal partnership to humble relationship of subordination or whatever reversible importance of one with or over another as between creator and the created, author and reader, or oneself with one’s psychological other. Even so, what ultimately matters is how there is always such relationship remaining as inseverable as indispensable in sustaining the narrative whether as multiple voices or as one single protagonist-narrator. However variable or reversible as the I and you relationship could possibly be in English or in foreign tongues, be it in The Waste Land or in Four Quartets, it is this relationship that truly matters with regard to whatever approaches we might adopt. This relationship is the key to all the vital issues that make each text the way it is from verbal transformation to allusive references. But, these are the issues that must always be handled with enough caution and restraint in accordance with the live context. THE NECESSITY OF RESTRAINT IN MAKING SENSE OF ALLUSIONS Clearly, as further indicated in the first stanza and the first twelve lines of the second stanza of the first part referred to above, when used along with “I” and “you,” the particular appearance of “and” would often become so alive as to function surreptitiously as involuntary de facto allusion through subtle verbal transformation. The scenario would, in fact, literally occur with any such otherwise too trivial to be noticeable words, be it intended this way or not, be it a trivial function word or an utterly commonplace content word. Even so, we however must also be cautious not to become too overly sensitive to take every word in this way as to make it unnecessarily too difficult, if not utterly impossible, for ourselves to move on or around with the text in the process of

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“writerly” reading. So should it be the likewise strategy even with any ostentatious allusion, which would also lead us astray to dig unnecessarily into itself especially in the name of supposedly authorial intention for information not so immediately relevant to the text itself the way we are reading it for the time being, however otherwise it may not appear so utterly irrelevant with a different perspective. While “and,” for instance, would literally be explored as de facto allusion, that is, as allusive and illuminating to a special narrative mode and mood in ways as could be possibly traced as far back as even to the biblical text, that is, Genesis, it however does not necessarily mean that every single “and” would be such a de facto allusion. Readers’ discretion should therefore always be advised. For exactly the same reason, readers’ discretion must also be advised as regards whether or how much it is necessary, if at all, for us to figure out in every possible detail who is who, that is, who is really “ Marie,” “my cousin,” and “you” especially in terms of the relationship and the setting suggested in the line in German. To avoid such traps or the swamps of “allusiveness,” which are, indeed, so many remaining hidden in the text, and often, as Gareth Reeves so precisely puts it, “has, notoriously, encouraged exegesis rather than criticism,”20 the readers’ discretion should even further be advised. Therefore, would it not be often enough for us to explore or simply treat such would-be allusions or scenarios of “allusiveness” adequately as some rather general ones that would give us a relatively coherent “readerly” reading we need to move on and around this intricate “writerly” text? Would not these allusive scenarios be good enough at this point to be explored, in other words, as such general references that suggest to us how the scenes so depicted in English and German could be treated as much actual as imagined, involving past as much as present in ways that could be so real and surreal to indicate a special mode and mood that is so characteristic of the text of The Waste Land as a whole? Would it not be enough in this way for us to use the depictions as much-needed stepstones for us to move forward in ways as “a noiseless patient spiker” does in Whitman’s eponymous poem to reach out further across the vast space of void? If so, there must be some kind of “middle way” for us to check out in this regard and it must always be there in the text itself simply because the text is always its own best interpreter in this way. If it would not necessarily be the way it always works, such as to find out what a word, such as “and,” would mean or function in the actual context by simply going back to its preset lexical meanings or parts of speech in the dictionary, neither would it work if to understand the meaning or function of an allusion simply means to go back as far as possible to the original sources or any traceable authorial intention. Likewise, if language does often reveal its “unwillingness to subject itself to classic discipline,”21 neither would any allusion mean or function merely

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in terms of what is all intended; it would rather work in ways simultaneously in accordance with and in spite of whatever ways as it is presumably set or meant to work, a priori. The reason, as Theodor Adorno would so possibly remind us of, is because how often “the author’s impulses are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp” and “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”22 An author’s thought or life, as Adorno emphasizes, is not “something translatable back into the staleness of already existing form”;23 and “just as it is scarcely possible to figure out what someone at a certain time and place felt and thought,” a linear approach “could not hope to gain anything essential” simply because, as Adorno so insists, indeed, in the process of thinking, “the author’s impulses are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp”; and therefore, “nothing,” indeed, “can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”24 As David Hume also suggests, there has never been any copula detected between any cause and effect either in physic or in thought.25 For Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, “there is little relation betwixt our actions, which are in perceptual mutation, and fixed and immutable laws.”26 We should therefore try to understand the meaning or function of allusion in the text of The Waste Land inasmuch the same way as we understand the meaning or function of any word used in the text, a posteriori, at once in accordance with and in spite of any such “original” verbal definition or “authorial intension in order to be truly able to move around and along as the author’s reliable and trusted “mon frère” for the fruitful interpretation of the writerly reading process. As further indicated by the case of “and,” we should even try to figure out what each allusion actually mean by making sure what it does not possibly mean in the actual context, however likely it may appear quite otherwise; we must make sure that this measure be literally taken inasmuch the same way as we must figure out the meaning or function of each keyword alive in terms of the actual context, regardless of whether or how it is categorized, a priori, in the dictionary as “meaningless” function word or “meaningful” content word. Likewise, we must also make ourselves understand what each allusion would possibly mean by not meaning in ways that it is supposed to mean or in ways so contrary to its “original” meaning or the way presumably as the author intends it. Therefore, for exactly the same reason, it would certainly be counter-productive, if not utterly futile, to trace whom the person is referred to in the allusion, real or imaginary, with the hope that once we know everything about the person the meaning of the text in which the allusion occurs would be clear. Would it not, for instance, be as much counter-productive to understand every possible meaning or every known, unknown, or knowable aspect of “a Chinese jar” in Four Quartets in line with a presumably identifiable authorial intention as it is equally thus counter-productive for us to know

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everything about Tristan and Isolde, especially in terms of why it is referred to in The Waste Land? Even if everything happens to be readily traceable, would it then mean that an adequate understanding is therefore guaranteed just in terms of the original meaning or authorial intention that may thus appear traceable or knowable? With such an innumerous quantity of actual, implicit, and de facto allusion inherent in the text as possibly in every word the way we have discussed, there would simply be nothing that would ever work to the advantage this way if we rely so much on the authorial intention. All we need to do therefore is to do it the pragmatical way, a posteriori, to understand the meaning of such allusions exactly in terms of their real or actual function in the text in accordance with and in spite of anything that we might know about them as regards whatever presumably original meanings or authorial meaning or intentions; it should be, in other words, as much the same strategy as we must adopt as with certain function words or content words spotted alive as important keywords in the text. Only in this way would we then move around and along with the text as with the actual poetry, that is, as “rhythmical creation the [meaningful] beauty” not as a text of divination. Only in this way could we then truly figure out the meaning of the meaningfully meaningless quoted lines in the original forms and languages, such as Tristan und Isolde as much as such sheer nonsensical nursery rhythm of the falling London Bridge. Only in this way would they, in other words, be adequately made sense of as meaningfully performative nonsenses in ways so characteristic of the text of The Waste Land from the very beginning to the end. Ultimately, again, it is only in this way or by the very means of the pragmatically spotted “form” or “pattern” of the uniquely performative nonsenses can words or music become so perpetually alive, like a Chinese jar, standing so impeccably in its perpetual still motion, with all its magnificence of meanings. GRASPING CONTEXTUALIZED MIND-LIBERATING POWER OF ALLUSIONS THROUGH DISCIPLINED SENSITIVITY Therefore, understanding adequately the meaning, function, or agency of allusions also means adequately understanding the performative nature of our common language so intensely explored in The Waste Land. This particular understanding nonetheless also indicates the pivotal value of balance and restraint, which would be crucial for us to avoid all the treacherous “swamps” scattered around in the text, that is, to be easily led astray or stay bogged down with hundreds of not-so-easy-to-decode actual and potential allusions; it is particularly so when even such simple words as “and” and “still,” which, as will be discussed in the next chapter, would also become the involuntary

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or accidental allusions in the live context if it is not the way that Eliot himself intends or would even be ever conscious of. We must therefore stay alert or conscious especially in terms of how much or how far we need to go to search for anything relevant about any allusion the way it is used in the text in order to understand the text, per se, instead not letting any allusion to take our attention away from the text to focus rather on itself. In this regard, it would indeed be an issue, for instance, for us to ponder upon whether or how much it would be appropriate, if at all, to dig into Richard Wagner’s personal life especially his illicit romance because presumably it might occur in one way or another in parallels with his work of Tristan and Isolde. Would such a digging really help us understand the text of The Waste Land any better in a conceivable way as regards any anecdote that might be related with Tristan and Isolde? Would Tristan and Isolde not be possibly explored mainly as the true but doomed romance in The Waste Land for an ironical contrast with the modern sexual stagnancy or the loveless or passionless love affairs so reflective of the spiritual and emotional wasteland at once within and without the characters in the poem? Inasmuch the same way, would not this allusion to Tristan and Isolde also be appropriately understood along with the one referring to the Hofgarten, in the German original as well, as a subtle satirical allusion to the decaying and dying courts of the Old Europe and the empty charms of the aristocratic life that foreshadows the scene of the wasteland, be they of “superior” German or “inferior” Russian? Asserting in German how they are not Russian, this seemingly casual effort for authenticity also automatically add much to the satirical meaning to the text with subtle allusion to the snobby Old Europe and its “authentic” cultural chauvinism in the disguise of their peculiar sensitivity to “authenticity” as revealed through the truth-revealing “intermediary sensation” aroused live in pure original flavor of German language. Further ironically, even so, the most authentically asserted high-class life, as it so alluded to, however, would not eventually appear as much in difference as from any other one in the whole “Unreal City” including even the lowest, such as typist’s or Lil’s, particularly in terms of the meaningless routines of their aristocratic life as so displayed in leisure. The more efforts made to assert the authenticity, purity, or superiority concerning the type of people, class, or race over another in English, German, French, or Italian could only result ultimately in the utmost irony and futility because everyone is “born equal” in the Unreal City, which is indiscriminately global as the widespread wasteland both within and without us; it is the Unreal City in the present as much as in the past as far as the whole universe remains as much the same wasteland spiritually, emotionally, as physically so “unweeded” or “out of joint,” as in Hamlet’s words. With all the allusions so alluded to and so deliberately in the foreign tongues as in English, the Unreal City is

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now indeed as globally “an unweeded garden futile” as the time that is so complexly “out of joint” in ways as even to make it such a “cursèd spite” or utterly impossible mission for Fisher King as much as for Hamlet. The moment when the Fisher King is so compelled to wonder “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (WL V, ix) when “London Bridge is [so hopelessly and helplessly] falling down falling down falling down” (WL V, ix), it could also be the moment that coincides with the time when Hamlet was deploring his destiny for being “born to set [his world] right.” How far should we then go in this way with each allusion in the text along with the ones that may shoot up at any time from our own minds as with whatever “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” thus aroused or awakened alive from the text as such an immeasurably enrich void of infinitely interpenetrated living cultural ecologies? How far should we go after or move along with these allusions especially as Eliot’s or his persona’s “mon semblable,—mon frère”? Should we ever become so unconsciously involved and encouraged even to act “almost as though [we would have poem] snatched from the author’s hands and cut, shaped, and read to fit the needs of an ailing modern age” or even become simply so emboldened to make the poem of The Waste Land “before {the author’s} very eye . . . metamorphosed into another identity, another existence, with which [Eliot] himself would eventually need to come to terms”? 27 Indeed, how far should we then move along or around as we all appear so deeply involved or “bogged down” in the “writerly” process of reading through the collaborative and performative language, which the text is increasingly becoming with our active participation or involvement? Should we then stay doggedly engaged with each and every allusion that we run into or simply go swiftly “island-hopping”? It is indeed such a subtle but vital issue as regards the appropriate balance and restraint that we must keep in mind in order to do justice to this great piece of poetry while trying to grasp it the way it demands and deserves. BALANCING THE LITERAL AND FIGURATIVE USE OF WORDS AND ALLUSIONS Indeed, as the cases of “and,” “I and you,” and allusions in foreign tongues so indicate, the collaborative and performative feature or nature of language, often so revealed through verbal transformation and context-occasioned live scenarios, such as the reversibility between I and you, would even appear as so occasioned from time to time to disrupt or reverse the usual narrative order. While sustaining our narrative and understanding of a text, the order always remains so pivotal in distinguishing reading in terms of a so-called literal sense of meaning and a figural sense of meaning in ways so clear-cut

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or easily distinguishable as if unlikely to be ever confused or disruptively reversible. Undoubtedly, to understand the live context-occasioned verbal transformation therefore could often mean to understand how it occurs in disrupting the usual hierarchically set dichotomic order that sustains the traditional sense-bewitching narrative order, which we all become so accustomed to, by means of making function words and content words so readily reversible or convertible as much as “I” and “you.” If so, this scenario should then be further understood in terms of the disruption of our usual sense regarding a literal and figural sense of reading a text. Could we then, for instance, possibly understand this stanza in terms of our usual literal and figural sense of reading? This often conflicting and complementary relationship of “literal” and “figurative” meaning could be further observed in terms of the passage about Madame Sosostris, “the famous clairvoyante” and other listed figures or items of the third stanza. To make sense of the passage especially figuratively for “meaning,” we must, for instance, move on to figure it out in any possible literal sense as regards each specific items, such as Madame Sosostris, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, Mrs. Equitone, along with the real “identity” of “I” in terms of who is who, which is which, which is imaginary and which is real one, and for what specific meaning that each appears the way each is in the text and so on, All these items, however, could appear at the same time as nothing more than being so literal in such a figural sense with each becoming as much as an equally contributing note, color, or “meaningful stroke” that makes a piece of jazz-like verbal tapestry of symphony. In this way, they could possibly all then be further understood perfectly in line with nothing else but Pablo Ruiz Picasso’s, Robert Rauschenberg’s, and perhaps even Wassily Kandinsky’s artworks. However much each discrete item could often appear as if so randomly assembled or blurred into a supposedly hard to figure out but meaningfully jumbled or intimately integrated mess, together, all these otherwise so utterly discrete elements convey so literally such a figural sense as regards a further radically floating world so uprooted, disjointed, with an infinite sense of loss and insecurity, regardless of how much each could appear so literally meaningless by itself. Therefore, in this way, the text of The Waste Land seems to become truly a “Poem with Allusions” in a way as Jay Parini may so indicate in the eponymous piece. “We don’t know who said what to whom / or why or when. The faces in the metro / look the same . . . / . . . / In country churchyards on the mossy stones, / their epigraphs may not impress critics, / but they won’t much care.”28 Indeed, however much everything in the quoted passage from The Waste Land may appear so equally indistinguishable to please critics, together, they are all so literally meaningful beyond any convenient or conventional measures of a literal and figurative distinction of meaning

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that would make a critic’s job much easier.29 In Parini’s piece, with the line “The faces in the metro / look the same” Parini certainly alluded to Ezra Pound’s famous piece “In a Station of Metro,” which applies in his poem as much as in this context. All “[t]he faces in the metro [of the text] / look the same” be it by the name of Madame Sosostris, Belladonna, The Hanged Man, or Mrs. Equitone. The more specific name is given, the more mysteriously the same each would appear within the very context of this wasteland from within as from without, as literal or as figurative, of past or as of present. With the issue of the collaborative and performative nature of language understood this way in terms of the difficulty of differentiating literal sense of reading from figural sense of reading, what still remains an issue is how to understand further the collaborative and performative nature of language in terms of the necessity and possibility in maintaining fruitfully the appropriate restraint in interpreting allusions; indeed, what remains would nonetheless still be such a vital and subtle an issue of how to maintain a balance between literal and figural sense of interpretation of allusions and the text of The Waste Land as a whole. We should, for instance, approach the text of The Waste Land inasmuch the same way as we approach so many of such mind-boggling biblical messages as this one, that is, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). However literally as one might go with it, the message itself does not so literally mean that one must literally hate one’s family the way as it indicates; it rather literally emphasizes instead the figurative meaning as to how anything that one may hold as the dearest in this part of world, such as one’s family and everything it represents, would not appear as valuable as compared or comparable with everything of the world beyond, for which anything of the utmost earthly values could therefore be readily forsaken. Indeed, while we need to avoid any too literal interpretation in ways as Nicodemus does when he asks Jesus how it is possible for a person to enter his mother’s womb and be born again (John 3:4), we should also allow such a literal interpretation for our own meaningful understanding of the text; we should, in other words, allow our interpretation based not upon any assumed or far-reached “original” meaning or authorial intention in accordance with any anecdotal or sets of doctrines-based sources but upon the live context itself. Actually, as regards how to benefit fruitfully from understanding the intricate issue of making appropriate literal and figural interpretation of a text for our ultimate goal of understanding The Waste Land, Nicodemus’s problem should also be taken as that of St. Augustine’s. Like Nikodemus, St. Augustine of Hippo initially tended to give most faithfully his literal interpretation of the biblical text in accordance with his training in the Manichaean tradition of thinking; it is however not until through St.

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Ambrose the Archbishop of Milan’s influences, he then started to understand the biblical text in a figurative way for a spiritual interpretation, which ultimately occasions his eventual “spiritual conversion” to Christianity from his initial “intellectual conversion” after such a long period of “lapse” in between as he thus confessed in his celebrated autobiography The Confession of St. Augustine. The reason for Augustine’s “intellectual conversion” not immediately culminating in the ultimate “spiritual conversion” to Christianity is certainly not pure intellectual or spiritual but physical or “contextual,” given Augustine’s hard-to-change old “hedonistic” lifestyle especially his fascinated romantic liaisons with Roman women. However, with his own version of “leap of faith” upon seemingly mere accidental but deeply contextualized catalytic experience of hearing children’s voices of sinning in the garden; he was then immediately led to a collection of Paul’s epistles that he had been reading. His much delayed “spiritual conversion” occurs eventually. What instantly caught his attention was the first line of the book laid open on the table, which revealed to him in an utterly literal sense the spiritual message, that is, “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites” (Romans 13:13–14). Indeed, for Augustine, the biblical line contains both plain and obscure passages and that “hardly anything may be found in these obscure places which is not found plainly said elsewhere,”30 while it is also true for Thomas Aquinas that “nothing necessary to faith is contained under the spiritual sense which is not elsewhere put forward clearly by the Scripture in the literal sense.”31 Certainly, this idea as St Augustine so perceived it may sound reasonable or persuasive enough even for Martin Luther to believe adamantly that “the words of the Holy Script can have no more than the one simplest meaning which we call the written one, or the literal meaning of the tongue.”32 Even so, there must always be a much subtly balanced “middle way” inherent in the infinitely rich text of The Waste Land as in the Bible; in these rich texts, there is, as Karlfried Froehlich so sums up, “no either/or [should ever be] intended: ‘The literal sense does not exclude the spiritual one, or vice versa. Rather, the two were related in a dialectical movement from to the other.’”33 LITERAL AND FIGURAL SENSE OF BALANCING AS ALLUSIONS-MEDIATED I-YOU DIALOG The literal and figural sense of interpretation of allusions and the overall piece of The Waste Land always remains such a vital and subtle issue as regards our entire approach to the poem; it remains, in other words, a fundamental

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issue of adequate distance and relevancy that we must always maintain and adjust ourselves to in order to understand appropriately the meanings of each allusion we deal with for the message of hope inherent in the text through them. The literal use of foreign originals has the literal impact of distancing ourselves in ways that we may finally come to understand them appropriately with a solid figurative understanding from time to time; we may even come to acquire through our experience with the foreign languages used in the poem a certain amount of real “intermediary sensation” live on top of the literal aspects of incommunicability even of our own native tongue as a natural common language in ways as discussed previously especially from Wittgenstein’s viewpoints. Vital as they are, such literal aspects that remain so subtly inherent in all the native tongues are however often not so easy for us to experience in our own languages, especially as a born native speaker of one of them, because everything of our native language is so often taken as much for granted as the air we breathe and the sunshine we enjoy. Everything of our native tongue would then so literally remain as parts of our innate “cultural blind spots” utterly “invisible” to us until we are so timely exposed to the mind-bewildering but simultaneously mind-refreshing scenarios brought up to us live through or along with the foreign originals. Any possible timely recognition and understanding of these vital and subtle aspects inherent in our native tongues as in all foreign ones would, in other words, unlikely occur, even if not utterly impossible, unless it is timely conveyed through such literal use of literary references in the foreign originals in ways as the case of du and “you” so indicates above. Such a direct use of foreign literary references or allusions would certainly create a further infinitely meaningful flexibility of distance, intimacy, and relevancy as regards the intricate relationship between “I” and “you.” As discussed above, the use of du from the German original would be, for instance, so helpful for us to understand further the intricate “I” and “you” relationship as it so appears in The Waste Land. “The intermediary sensation” inherent in the German original would therefore not be lost as it would otherwise with the translated version merely for “meaning”; it would be the same case even with the readers whose German proficiency level is not yet up to the native speakers’ because literally the meaning-making sound and word order in the original is actually as important as the “meaning” itself, if not even more so as in the live context. The meaning-making sound and word order, in other words, is literally the part of the meaning, per se, however figuratively the “meaning” could be so readily interpreted or translated as usual. As the case of du so further understood in the context especially in such balanced and often mutually reversible and illuminating ways, it is clear that the allusions used in the original foreign tongues in the context of The Waste Land would often eventually emerge, contrary to our

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expectation, as neither too deep or ambiguous to be ever reachable for any adequate interpretation nor would they become merely decorative or rhetorical in ways as Wittgenstein would so indicate with reference to as something of an “architectural ornament that supports nothing.”34 Instead, they would emerge perfectly “functional” in both literal and figural sense as allusions, which should be taken, in other words, as something as irreplaceable as the enlarged lion head–shaped keystone of the Palazzo Borgazzi, Milan, Italy, which is as much highly decorative as highly functional in sustaining the pivotal supporting power of the arch. Even if most of the allusions in The Waste Land, such as the case of du, could often appear at the first sight as neither like the kind of “architectural ornament that supports nothing” nor like anything utterly indispensable; they, as a matter of fact, do often have some special role to play contingent upon our own adaptable or adept cognition or re-cognition. With the use of allusions in the live context of The Waste Land understood in this way, it would even appear so helpful as if there would be no any other possibly compatible means or ways to understand the intricate and constantly changing “I and you” relationship but the subtle pattern as so invoked between Keats or his literary persona and the nightingale in “Ode to a Nightingale.” In the context of The Waste Land, “you” could also be so literally identified in such a figurative way as the nightingale would, at one time, make “I” so “too happy in thine happiness” as the “deceiving elf,” even though “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is fam’d to do,” while, at another, as the “immortal Bird” who “wasn’t not born for death.” This alternating impact of distancing, however, could also be immediately felt, for instance, through alternate use of “you” and its German counterpart “du.” The direct use of du in the original German indicates a subtle sense of distance alternating with a possible touch of “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” as different from those generated in the familiar personal pronoun “you.” In this subtly variable context of The Waste Land as in “Ode to a Nightingale,” “you” could then also become such a “plaintive anthem fades / Past the near meadows, over the still stream, / Up the hill-side. Now and then, ‘tis buried deep”; it is such an elusive or elfish bird that would so constantly fly near and far and ultimately away with “Hope,” which is also so at once literally and figuratively “the thing with feathers”35 to “I.” The “I” would therefore wonder whether “In the next valley-glades: Was it a vision, or a waking dream? Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?” In this subtly variable context of The Waste Land, the “I” would even come to wonder as much as Zhuangzi does at the end of the second chapter of the eponymous book, “On the Equality of Things,” whether he has dreamed a butterfly in his dream or he has simply been the butterfly that appears in the dream. The “I” could also happen to be so bewildered as Edgar Allan Poe did in the eponymous whether life is after all “a dream

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within a dream.”36 In this subtly variable context of The Waste Land, it is no longer clear whether it is the intricate “I and you” relationship that creates the intricate poetic context even from the very beginning or simply the other way around. In this particular context or scenario, the more I think, the more I am not, whereas, at the same time, the more I am not, thinking in this way in relation with or through “you” as the inseparable Other, the more I further am, apparently, Cogito, ergo sum. Regardless, with this meaningfully distance-suggesting and distanceadjusting elfish “you” at its side, the “I” appears to have been granted a spatiotemporally variable identity as much sustained with “you” as its forever inalienable other. So is every specific item or name literally referred to in the live context of The Waste Land also thus instantly be endowed with the invoked allusive power; everything could therefore, in other words, be so literally bestowed with any possibly fine-tunable figurative meaning through a figural meaning-making network or literary context through a variable spatiotemporally adjustable relationship with “I,” be it of a person or place, be it of anything imaginary or real, as a cliché or anything unfamiliar. Out of this intricate network of relationships that makes up the context of The Waste Land, pivoted upon and around “I,” there would certainly also be different viewpoints generated as shifting from past to present or the other way around at the same time. In the live network as the context of The Waste Land, which is so truly reminiscent of a deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, clichés could bring fresh thoughts, whereas anything strange could also become familiar through the always timely agency of the most commonplace “you.” The meaning of everything referred to in the context could vary significantly contingent upon a virtually infinite spectrum of subtle “intermediary sensation” that “you” evokes or invokes, especially through “du” or “mon frère,” such counterpart versions of “you” in the foreign languages. Even everything that would otherwise appear so nonsensical could then also become collaboratively and performatively meaningful, contingent upon how or how much the reader as “mon frère” or “du” could possibly be capable of making sense of the lines, regardless of whether they are deliberately or casually quoted or appropriated from the foreign originals, untranslated, such as the directly quoted line from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, as discussed above. Therefore, to make sense of the lines, all depends on, in other words, whether or how “you” as “mon frère” could figure out the figurative meaning that the author so literally set in the foreign tongues with all the untranslated or utterly untranslatable primordial “intermediary sensation” that conveys the “primitive wisdom” so inherent in poetry as the “first language” of humanity and the “dictionary of the soul.” Undoubtedly, saturated in the network of The Waste Land as such deeply interpenetrated the living cultural ecologies, forever remaining hidden would

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there also be the inexhaustible meaning-making power and potential of the literary text itself, be it accountable or not in terms of any actual or perceived authorial intention. Any allusion in the context could therefore always be understood as literally the cornerstone for variable viewpoints. In the literary context, each allusion suggests a different point of view, which could be invoked not only from the author but also from readers to make an infinitely rich context of The Waste Land. Indeed, in this literary context so rich with the potentially infinite allusions and viewpoints pivoted upon and around “I,” the reader could become simultaneously the invoked participant and spectator as a part of “mon frère” or “du”; the reader would then be, in other words, endowed with readily reversible views of life as tragedy or as comedy or simply as in the viewpoint of “La Divina Commedia” or “La Comédie humaine” contingent upon a varying distance in ways as Dante and Balzac would so suggest. However tragic as human life could possibly be when viewed in close distance, especially when the observer is as much involved as a participant as even to occasion a cathartic experience to himself, it could still appear as much of a comedy or as part of human comedy that reveals the very folly and vanity of humanity as the leading causes to the catastrophic tragic consequences; it would be particularly an occasion of comedy especially when it is viewed from bird’s eye view or the perspective of God. This is the particular view so characteristic of The Waste Land as it is so pivoted upon and around the intricately alternating and constantly conversing “I and you” relationship. Therefore, contingent upon whether or how or how much the nuances-revealing collaborative and performative roles of allusions so deeply inherent in each language could be adequately recognized in the live context, the meaning of The Waste Land could then vary significantly from one reader to another in handling the allusions as “mon frère” in terms of each own actual sensitivity and sensibility. THE FUNCTION OF CHARACTERS: REAL OR IMAGINARY For exactly the same reason, no matter how much we could identify these persons referred to in The Waste Land as imaginary, real, or historical, one thing is absolutely certain, that is, they must all be “functional” or simply “fictional,” or “figurative” in one way or another, contingent upon whether or how much their “functionality” would be adequately recognized; they must be functional inasmuch the same way as these historical figures, such as Alexzander the Great or Napoleon Bonaparte, whom Lemuel Gulliver runs into during his journey. The reference to Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Mrs. Equitone, and so on is therefore as much functional or necessary

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as references to cousin Marie, and the German-speaking, coffering-sipping, and sunlight-enjoying aristocrats in the Hofgarten; they are the “functional” characters so indispensable for bringing to the poem not simply the sense of the real but even probably the real sense of life itself with the persons so specifically referred to by the names in ways as it is so widely practiced worldwide. In Africa as in China, how specific names are referred to could stand for in a precative way or even invoke specifically the real things thus referred to, at least in terms of C. G. Jung’s accounts in The Modern Man in Search of a Soul. Quite apparently, this is exactly what the passage about “Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante” reveals to us, among other things. This particular rhetorical as well as psychological impact seems to be further pivoted through the hidden parallelism with the use of “here is . . . here is . . . which I am . . . which is.” These verbal phrases used in the passage, in other words, are very much like the use of “and” and, as we previously discussed in the preface, the use of “the,” which gives us timely further atmospheric sense that makes a real picture of reality especially in ways as what Wittgenstein emphasizes about the intricate relationship among “reality,” “imagination,” “picture,” “sense,” and “thought.” Undoubtedly, for Wittgenstein, thinking and imagination are simply such an inseparable natural process of human cognition because “a proposition is a picture of reality” and “a proposition is a model of reality as we imagine”37 and even our “thought” by nature “is proposition with a sense.”38 Each specific person or item of things, events, or even locations so referred to therefore often functions or performs so collaboratively in ways as much compatible as with each case of verbal transformation that creates “a picture of reality” as “a model of reality” comprised of myriads of intricate relationships, representational, nonsensical, or of anything that can “only be shown, not said” but “with a sense.” Indeed, as briefly outlined in the preface, when the verbal transformation occurs in the live context of The Waste Land, the “meaningful” content words would sometimes become “functionalized” to appear so humbly indispensable not for what they could mean but rather for how they might sound together along with other words to make the meaningfully resonating verbal flows, whereas the “meaningless” function words would often appear so significantly substantiated to assume the de facto role of nouns and verbs especially in the process of itemization as even to become, as in Seymour Chatman’s words, “not merely being referred to [. . . but] are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, as substantial as any character” with a consequence as “almost ‘a sort of personification.’”39 Therefore, just as all the words could appear so equally indispensable and “functional” in making the text of The Waste Land truly a “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty,” be they pigeonholed as “meaningless” function words or “meaningful” content words, so are the specific figures so referred to in the text; they would

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all become adequately “functionalized” in the live context, be they otherwise real or imaginary; the real could therefore become “functionalized” as much as the imaginary would emerge so substantiated to be real. To sustain an appropriate understanding of the allusions in ways as the verbal transformation so suggests, here is another cross-reference to be taken into consideration as regards the anonymous piece “Painted Cross: Saint Francis Legend” of fifteenth century.40 The focus of the piece is apparently the eye-catching or attention-grabbing “painted cross,” which is depicted in such a way, huge, heavy, and deep in color to symbolize the theme on “the coming into being” of a new faith-based community called Christianity. Centered around Jesus and upon the cross, there are also the figures of people gathered around him symbolically from all the walks of life to accept, acknowledge, and celebrate the birth of a faith-based new community upon the death of Jesus, which is apparently also so suggestive of a triumphant process of transformation as from Jesus to Christ and from Christ to Christianity. This is the meaning of “crucifixion” as it is so emphasized with the painted cross. What the picture depicted is certainly not the actual process of crucifixion but a symbolic aftermath of it. Nobody would be crucified in such a pose with arms gently spread out and body / torso smoothly elongated, all of which only have the impact that suggests peace, beauty of femininity, and almost the kind of divine touch of serenity rather than violence, pain, and brutality of actual crucifixion, that is, not in any way as compatible as with Peter Paul Rubens’s “Christ on the Cross.” However, the feeble elongated or almost femininized torso, which could also be the focus or a part of the focus, immediately indicates its otherwise invisible strength and power in relation to the very image of the painted cross. The cross certainly suggests power especially in terms of the very eye-catching bold color and straight vertical and horizontal lines, which all emphasize strength and stability, along with the huge size and imaginable weight of the cross itself. In this regard, this picture reconciles all that otherwise utterly irreconcilable, such as the feeble and pale-colored human body, which not only suggests weakness, peace, serenity, and divinity but also indicates the strength and power of stability, whereas the image of death becomes the image of eternality. This reconciliation of the irreconcilable remains the crucible of all to be called masterpieces. Anything, in other words, however otherwise appearing utterly irreconcilable, such as death and eternality, weakness and strength, ugliness and beauty, brutality and kindness, “the fire and the rose,” would so often appear immediately and naturally reconciled or irreconcilable in the hand of a master artist to become the masterpiece. Whichever way we might pursue for an adequate interpretation of the painting, what appears immediately relevant with our understanding of the text of The Waste Land, however, is not how realistic or symbolic the

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representation of the subject matter could possibly be but rather how likely we might have ended up losing sight of the meaning of a big picture when we devoted too much of all our analytical attention to the individual detail in ways so discretely for whatever literal or figural significance of it in ways as we might thus also deal with allusions of The Waste Land. Again, even if we may not be able to figure out who is who or who are the figures at either side of Jesus on the huge cross, and what the person does at the feet of Jesus, this “failure,” however, does not prevent us from understanding literally the figural meaning of how together these figures represent people gathering from all walks of life to celebrate the birth of a new faith-based community called Christianity in ways as the gigantic cross so stands for. Likewise, even if we may not be able to know immediately, or if ever, who Madame Sosostris is or what Mrs. Equitone stands for, it does not mean that we would not know as much literally as figuratively the meaning as to why these people are referred to in the text. As mentioned previously in the preface, even our temporary failure in not immediately recognizing the familiar tune of “The Girl from Ipanema” improvised in “From Billie Holiday To Edith Piaf” by Wynton Marsalis Quintet and Richard Galliano does not ruin the pleasure of enjoying the jazz piece; instead, it would even add much to it with a sense of mysteriousness. Similarly, these literary figures are there not really in relation with any of such discrete matters that would indiscriminately demand and deserve the equal amount of our critical attention to each of them; they are there rather as meaningfully as the contributing lines, colors, space, balance, and proportion used in making such spectacular meaningfully meaningless elements that make the spectacular artworks by Pablo Ruiz Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg, and even Wassily Kandinsky. They are there for the special “museum effect” in ways as we define the term in the preface. So characteristic of the text of The Waste Land, especially with all the allusions of such diverse sources from across disciplines and cultures, the term “museum effect” suggests, once again, briefly, how the artworks otherwise utterly discrete by themselves could sometimes appear so naturally belonging to one another as a group once put together for a special exhibition in the museum. Juxtaposed next to one another, the artworks could then often appear so naturally with one another even in such a way as if each were born exactly for the other within this particular group and for this particular occasion. At the same time, however, any one of them could also be so easily dissembled from the group either for an individual exhibition the way each deserves or for another grouping under a different exhibition theme. Therefore, even if the very existence or value of the artworks in question does not necessarily depend on one another, it does seem to be so contingent upon such an “unpremeditated, accidental” grouping or occasional juxtaposition, which apparently occasions or brings out from each artwork something as invaluable as in ways otherwise

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not possible. Do not all the allusions function exactly this way in the live context of The Waste Land? Furthermore, all the persons and items so referred to could all be there as the colorfully improvised musical notes that make the mosaic of “cool” jazz, such as Mile Davis’s “Blue in Green.” Undoubtedly, neither would the “failure” hinder us from coming further to gasp the very beauty and power of a forest even if we cannot figure out or identify exactly, one by one, what types of trees that make up the dense forest in terms of their general types or names. Otherwise, what would be such a total loss for us to miss seeing the beauty and power of the forest with all our attention so unduly lavished instead upon the very detail of each tree including even the specific patterns of veins as if this is the only way for us to know the forest? Therefore, indeed, knowing each individual tree would not guarantee knowing the forest if we do not mind the overall “the form, the pattern” of forest inherent in the allusions, which would ultimately make everything of The Waste Land forever alive inasmuch the same way as it makes “words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ I, v). Would not such a counter-productive scenario occur to us, if we let our minds so excessively bogged down with each allusion inasmuch the same way as we might have thus been trying to identify the unidentifiable or notworth-being-so-discretely identified minor figures in the painting of “The Painted Cross” as mentioned above? Would it not be so ironical for us to focus so unduly on one partial component or single detail, be it of the forest or the pained cross, only to miss ultimately what we must not miss in the first place, that is, the big picture or the overall meaning or “museum effect” that the allusions all contribute in making as a group? If so, as it is also mentioned in the preface, we would then be able to dodge the common fate as readers of The Waste Land, which would turn us all away from the swamps of its “allusiveness”; these are the treacherous textual swamps, which, once again, as Gareth Reeves so points out, “has, notoriously, encouraged exegesis rather than criticism.”41 THE VERBALLY INCOMMUNICABLE NONSENSES AND SILENCE THAT SERENDIPITOUSLY COMMUNICATE The performative use of language therefore should be appropriately understood in this way particularly in terms of the visual quality, sound impact, narrative rhythm, syntactic order, and verbal familiarity. These elements sustain the language’s performative function through various as surreptitiously effective as often serendipitously “invisible” text–welding elements, such as

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the function words as much as the mind-boggling allusions as in the case with The Waste Land. If so, the first part should also be considered as introducing a key phenomenon so characteristic of The Waste Land as regards how the incommunicable verbal nonsenses or even silence would communicate so serendipitously through the hidden performative power of language. The issue of incommunicability or incomprehensibility particularly concerning the use of allusions should then seem to make some sense. Indeed, however irrelevant our worded world could often appear as much as our real world or however utterly fragmented, irrelevant, or incompressible as all the references and allusions would so often emerge live in the text, everything of The Waste Land would ultimately be made sense of. Indeed, everything would still be finally made sense of, contingent upon whether or how one could find ways to make sense of it through the hidden power or agency of the performative nature of language. However, to take advantage of this hidden agency, the performative nature of language must be explored simultaneously along with and against our entrenched traditional focus on the narrative and descriptive function of language that prioritizes syntax, logic, meaning, and understanding over sound, contradiction, sensation, and feeling. The performative use of language would then help us make sense of the incommunicable nonsenses if we know when, where, how to tilt skillfully our interpretation at once in accordance with and in spite of the traditional hierarchically dichotomized way of reading. If so, we should then have enough in our favor this way to make sense of the extensive use of the otherwise seemingly so meaningfully meaningless nonsensical references, allusions, incoherent bits and pieces of dialogue, and the overall collage of texts. We would then even come to realize how the collaged texts of The Waste Land could be so “indiscriminately” made from high-brow as much as from low-brow literary sources, such as classic literature and popular oral culture, in such a way as to make the collaged sources often appear so readily reversible or convertible as a parody of one another whether deliberately or otherwise. Indeed, in the making of the Unreal City or the “unweeded garden” of the wasteland, the pleasurable life of leisure shown in coffee sipping and German talking in Hofgarten would not be as much different as from the innumerous lives of anyone by the name of Madame Sosostr, Mrs. Equitone, Lil, or even the corpses buried in the garden or under the sea; it would be not much different, in other words, from the scenario when Hamlet contemplates and comments on each skull he picks up in the graveyard regarding the life of each person to whom the skull once belongs. The issue of incommunicability, therefore, could often appear as much communicable as it could be so situationally contingent upon how well the actual role of “mon frère” that readers assume and perform in terms of their adequate capability; it would be so contingent upon how well the readers could understand the text, which may perform or

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“speak” so profusely in silence as in nonsenses of anything that can “only be shown, not said.” Undoubtedly, in the text as much collaged as The Waste Land, everything could thus remain so performatively as meaningfully nonsensical or meaninglessly meaningful until any further sense could be literally made of them through the active role of readers’ as the indispensable “mon semblable,–mon frère,” These “mon frère,” however, should be the readers who know how to take advantage of the innate performative nature of language, which is often left aside in sleep due to our habitual way of reading for things that make sense, such as logic and meaning, at the expense of any that does not seem to. Everything therefore could eventually, in other words, be made sense of but not until the irrelevant references, allusions, dialogues, and abrupt shifts of narrative point of view in question become timely relevant, coherent, and sensemaking without at the irrevocable loss of the vivid nonsensical sensesuggesting performative mode. Undoubtedly, this could thus literally also mean not until our “common language” could be relieved at least temporarily from all the mind-stuffing or thoughts-suffocating clichés that become so tied up with it. As much indicated in the first part as in the following ones, it is indeed only until our “common language” could be ever made further sense of through its own innate performative power in making nonsenses performatively be to mean that we would finally be able to figure out the meaning of nonsenses through its performative being in every conceivable way. This would therefore literally mean for our “common language” to perform naturally through its contextually enlivened and enlivening being and meaning even as nonsenses by such antidotal measures of using quotations directly from foreign languages or invoking jazz-like imagination from the readers to improvise with various allusions. The readers would certainly improvise with the allusions through the timely mediation or ever-present agency of function words, regardless of how or whether the allusions be made of from prestigious foreign poems or mere nonsensical traditional chanting, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” Indeed, here are the verbal images of the hyacinth girl scenario that perform or act out the otherwise utterly unutterable utmost personal feeling in a state of being between or even beyond any regular sense of unbeing and being, living and dead, such as “They called me the hyacinth girl. . . . / Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not / Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead.” This is the state of being that could only be pictured as it is acted out in suggested silence as “the light of heart” and through the “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” inherent in the untranslatable original sounds words, that is, “Oed’ und leer das Meer.” Undoubtedly, as the lines about Hyacinth girl so indicate, even from the very beginning, there would so instantly emerge many such vivid but hard-to-make-sense of

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scenes. Apparently, the scenes are certainly of such mixed modes and moods, so at once of utmost private scenes from both within and without between only “you and I,” from the remote past as from immediate present, as if so simultaneously of such a realistic and surrealistic world in ways that can “only be shown, not said,” or presented as performed but not possibly as narrated in any sequential or logical sense as usual. With scenes such as these, the first part thus also reminds us of a pivotal issue of incommunicability of our common language in communicating things that may not be so common or often too private to be communicable in the common tongue “fit” only for its common use in a common way unless so performatively by means of such uncommonly expedient ways as nonsenses or silence. The scenario could be as compatible a case as with many other ones concerning the myriad nuances of “pains” and “colors,” which are, as previously mentioned, so utterly incommunicable by means of any lexically defined or categorizable verbal meanings of our common language. In ways as Wittgenstein and Dostoevsky both emphasize, among others,42 our common language is apparently an utterly inapt “tongue” for communicating about the myriad nuances concerning our intimate sensations of “things,” such as a toothache and variable tints of color. The reason for Wittgenstein is almost quite self-evident as regards how logically “‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same as obeying it”43 and furthermore “the individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.”44 Nonetheless, things, however so incommunicable, could still be communicated or become communicable by means of a performatively pictorial mode, even if the particular mode would suggest deep problems of incommunicability as if through the riddle-like visual image or picture painted in words and in ways as vividly displayed in the line above. What the line presents could certainly be a picture painted or presented in words but it could also be a picture of a riddle that confuses us as readers as to what to make sense of it in terms of the way it is presented. With all the images lumped together so impressionistically as if in a piece by Robert Rauschenberg or Wassily Kandinsky, it would indeed be so hard to make sense of it by sorting things out, that is, by means of our usual spatiotemporally well-categorized rational approach, which is always so readily at our disposal. However, when we do take what Wittgenstein says about a riddle seriously, the verbal image could by no means even be a riddle but an utterly incommunicable nonsense because there could be hardly a question to be clearly formulated about it nor could there be an equally formulable sensible answer to it. Therefore, for Wittgenstein, “when the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the

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question be put into words. The riddle does not exist.”45 This is exactly also why, for Wittgenstein, “scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”46 These lines quoted above about the Hyacinth girl therefore depict a picture of nonsensical scenario to be passed over in silence because, as Wittgenstein would also thus suggest, “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.”47 HOW ABSURDITY AND NONSENSES COMMUNICATE: CASES OF MUTUAL ILLUMINATION However, quite ironically, in the live context of The Waste Land, not only does silence speak, but also does nonsenses. Silence speaks through its quiet performance that communicates in the live context of The Waste Land as if in a mode of silent film, whereas nonsenses speak through scenes of such theatrical performance compatible with the meaningfully meaningless rambling of Waiting for Godot. Silence in this regard speaks volume of a prevailing sense of aesthetic and intellectual confusion in ways otherwise utterly impossible, so ironically do nonsenses, as a result of the verbal incommunicability, which could only be as much vividly “shown, but not said” as silence, as if by no other better means than nonsensically performative in context of The Waste Land. In this way, we would come to feel in silence as through nonsenses the pain of a prevailing sense of confusion, which occurs so uncomfortably and yet so irresistibly real, as if all of a sudden with everything so smashed up in your face, in the whole gestalt impact of a nonsensically vivid picture of confusion in a violently silent film or in such a noisily visual scene of utmost shocking chaos from a piece by Wassily Kandinsky48; it is so simultaneous from within as from without, so at once real and surreal, so much about past as about immediate present. The issue of how nonsenses and silence could be performatively communicative could be further made sense of in terms of the last stanza that concludes the first part about “Unreal City” and the speaker happens to recognize someone by the name of Stetson!” in ways so reminiscent of the scene of the protagonist seeing the throng of the dead soldiers marching through the tunnel in Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 film Dreams (夢, Yume), with which The Waste Land often appears as a perfect blueprint in so many ways. Indeed, in this very scene, be it a real or surreal scenario, the very occasion of seeing someone by the name of “Stetson!” gives the speaker the rare opportunity for himself to have the impulsive moment to rush out of the slow-moving ghost-like throng of humanity, all of which apparently have so many dreadful

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“miles to go before [they] sleep.” Furthermore, however nonsensical as they may sound or whatever they ask about, what really matters with the questions is not the formation that words of utterances seek but rather such an opportunity for the persona to try to be human again by such a desperate means to speak to someone; he is, in other words, so desperately in need of “outlet” to let go all the otherwise extremely annoying but utterly unutterable toothache-like inner emotion, anxiety, or enuis so pent up inside him. In this regard, what he talks is not important but the fact that he literally talks; he needs to be human by simply finding someone to talk to, someone like Enkidu for Gilgamesh, and, consequently, he can be human, once again, by the sheer means of “talking” regardless of whether the “conversation” could ever be made sense of or really be communicative as the case with what occurs between two neighbors across a piece of wall in Frost’s “Mending Wall,” as will be discussed in chapter 2. Quite ironically, the absurd scenario with the nonsensical questions does seem to make perfect sense in this way by revealing how the persona with his suppressed desire really wants to be human by breaking free from the moving throng of humanity so endless about or toward its daily humanity-eroding daily routine in ways as both James Wright and Robert Frost so well expressed in the respective poems of “A Blessing” and “Sopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Undoubtedly, as if of a mere coincidence, this scenario could be further made sense of with the poem “A Blessing” by James Wright. The poem reveals how the persona resumes his humanity first and foremost by describing how the tragic segregation between humanity and nature becomes so tragically invisible. In the poem, on the one side of the barbed wires, there is the world of nature, a pure land of pasture, or perhaps, quite symbolically, the nature’s last serene piece of “reservation,” with two beautiful ponies freely roaming around. This is the world of nature that still remains unsoiled, especially with the ponies as the living symbols of its unspeakable beauty, its intimacy, its contentment, and its self-sufficiency and yet existing under the all-encroaching shadow of modernity, which is symbolized by the highway on the other side of barbed wires.49 Symbolic of all conceivable conveniences and constant demand for efficiency, the ubiquitous highway exists, nonetheless, as if only to rush people to their dreadful routine, particularly when “many of us,” as Henry Rosemont, Jr. points out, are so “obliged to take jobs we do not like . . . in order to buy things that we do not need . . . , all the while destroying our natural and social environments as we do so.”50 Such daily commuting numbs our nerve so much that we no longer see the beautiful and once so spiritually uplifting scenes outside the car windows beyond and along the highway. Our life has become so modernized, standardized, or “otherized” that we stop feeling the power of nature that enriches our humanity.51

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Between the beautiful pasture and dreadful highway, there is only the barbed wire, but to step over it, we need what Emerson calls “a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind,” which could enable us to restore “the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects” for “the charming landscape” that is so tragically fenced into “property owned by Miller, Locke, or Manning.”52 We also need the courage to “trespass” not only across the visible barbed wires but also through the numerous invisible boundaries inside ourselves. With such a step taken, the soul is instantly liberated in full bloom, which is indeed “a blessing,” as it would indeed occur so “Suddenly [as] I realize / That if I stepped out of my body I would break / Into blossom.” The poem, therefore, illuminates for us not only the necessity but also the possibility for a genuine holistic humanity-sustaining reunion with nature through identifying the in / visible barriers that hinder us from such a journey, joy, or blessing of homecoming and truly “self-becoming.” The function word “that,” along with “into” as its climax-intensifying echo, literally punches, with the emphatic or dramatized pensive pauses, at such strategic positions and critical moments, the Zen-like “sea-changing.” The function word “that” also plays a likewise truly “invisible” but indispensable role in bringing out the meaning of the poem at the most critical or climactic moment in the last sentence with reference to the special experience with or revelation of Zen called “satori” (悟り) as in Japanese or “dun wu” (頓悟) as in Chinese. In this regard, “Stetson!” functions exactly the way the ponies do in occasioning humanity blossoming moment. As it is already so hinted with the reference to the throng of humanity with regard to many dreadful “miles to go before [they] sleep,” would not the absurd scenario of the Unreal City also be read along with Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”? Would not such a “sea-change” moment of “break-into-blossom” experience likely also occur inside the personae in both poems but in drastically different ways? Would not the preposition “by” in Frost’s poem suggest as much a tremendous life-changing experience through an occasional simple “stop” as “that” with “into” in Wright’s poem?53 Undoubtedly, the poem is also about a profound spiritual crisis of our modern world and a crucial or probably even life-saving resolution through the imperceptible mediation of “nature”; it is however a special kind of nature so full of alluring images and temptations of death, such as the “deep woods” and “snowflakes,” which make the nameless persona ponder like Hamlet “to be or not to be” or “to sleep or to move on,” even if what confronts him could by no means as much a “cursèd spite” as such an utterly impossible mission Hamlet as Fisher King as to “set [the ruined] my lands in order.” With his serious decision to move on, no matter how dreadfully boring his life could possibly be, the persona instantly becomes a “human”; it is because he finally, or probably for the first time, ever, in his life, truly makes a decision for himself,

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by himself, and thus be / comes himself, even if at this quite late stage of his life. “[He] thinks, therefore [he] is” in terms of the Cartesian notion “Cogito ergo sum.” Like the persona in “A Blessing,” the persona here probably also has passed this place innumerous times previously, but has always been too busy, too preoccupied with his daily routine even to stop just for a minute to look at it or to “smell the roses” all around until this moment or at this very late stage of his life when he is almost completely worn out. He then begins to wish for a permeant escape, perpetual rest, or forever-lasting “sleep” in a quiet and peaceful way as the woods and snowflakes may so suggest or invite him. He wants the mysterious woods to take him in and find him a perpetual resting place there in the deepest recesses therein and let the all-covering snowflakes erase any possible trace of his meaningless existence or miserable “being in the world”; however, his “conscience” so tied up with the old habits as symbolized by the horse, which knows only its routine, ironically saves his life by disrupting his contemplation on a possible “permanent sleep” or “perpetual stop” by words on a snowy evening. At this point, regardless of how everything may still look or remain exactly the same as before, with the decision to go back to the old life, the persona is no longer the same old person but a newborn individual, an “autonomous” person, who thinks by himself, for himself, and becomes himself. If humanity could indeed be understood as Descartes and Kierkegaard so suggest in terms of one’s “rational” decision or self-conscious choice that one makes, the persona finally becomes a human by probably passing simultaneously within a split second the three fundamental humanity-defining stages that Kierkegaard describes in Either / Or as “aesthetic,” “ethic,” and “religious,” with or without a probable “leap of faith.” He is, in other words, no longer reminiscent of the “savage” in Frost’s “Mending Wall” who just mindlessly does all the routines merely in terms of “the ways things are” or what his father said before, that is, “Good fences make good neighbors.” The nameless persona in this poem becomes instead more closely related to the actively thinking, constantly questioning, or conventional-wisdom-doubting speaker in the same poem, who challenges his own wall-mending activity by means of incessantly questioning it. No longer is he the anonymous persona, in a word, a mule, a horse, a “savage,” or a “Willy Loman,” who dies doggedly in pursuit of his “American Dream” in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman but a self-discovering person. Nor would the persona ever suffer the fate of “a loaded gun” with “but the power to kill without the power to die.” Even if he may not have any such compatible self-conscious moment of revelation, if at all, as Wright’s person does, that is, “Suddenly realize[s] that if [he] could step out of [his] body, he would break into blossom,” he is still “born” a new person out of the moment with his decision to move on. He is in this way also “blessed” though quite unconsciously. Even if everything may still go on exactly as usual, as before, or as forever, the persona

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could never be another Mrs. Mallard, who would “die of joy” in Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour,” or forever live in the unending misery of “immortality” as one of Jonathan Swift’s Struldbrugs or Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Tithonus.” Even if he may choose not to resume his usual path, after all, he may still find his “self” alive in the choice as is Mrs. Edna Pontellier, the protagonist in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, who is awakened only to swim freely to her own death. Whichever way the spiritual crisis may end, “to be or not to be,” it is still his own decision to make, with which the persona eventually becomes himself. Regardless, it might not be just a stroke of luck that the absurd scenarios of The Waste Land coincide with these not so nonsensical scenarios as serendipitous cases of mutual illumination especially in terms of how absurdity and nonsenses could communicate in the specific context in ways as the text of The Waste Land so represents. In the live context of The Waste Land, nonsenses therefore also vividly communicate especially so often through the verbal incommunicable impact of momentary pensive pauses of pondering in silence created in such mindsuspending and thought-paralyzing occasion. This expressive moment of silence however is not created as usual in a logical sequence but through the mind-boggling scene of confusion. Readers can probably feel so directly or immediately this sense of confusion inasmuch the same Gestalt impact as the audience of Waiting for Godot would while watching the scenes unrolling on the stage. Therefore, however much we may busy ourselves trying to make sense of the scenes that do not seem to make any sense, we should always remind ourselves of how these scenes would probably never be made sense of the usual way we try to make sense of because they, as Wittgenstein so remind us, can “only be shown not said” as nonsenses. However, once we realize we could not understand them the usual way unless accepting them as “nonsenses,” they would then instantly make sense as vividly as communicative nonsenses. Indeed, they would not at all, in other words, make any sense to us only until we could learn how to accept the nonsenses the way they truly are, that is, not so arbitrarily or habitually as a sensemaking logical proposition but as “intermediary sensation”-arousing or “auditory imagination”-awakening performative nonsenses, par excellence. Not until then, we would still, in other words, never know how to enjoy the scenes of “nonsenses” or realize how performatively expressive as they could possibly be; until then we would finally make sense of them even if nothing “meaningful” could still appear likely to be ever said of by them as nonsenses, that is, by means of any clearly formulable proposition inasmuch as a communicable form of questions and answers through any sensible syntactic structure in a corresponding logical order, sequence, and sense. These scenes undoubtedly could never be made sense of in any usual way because they could indeed not be said but shown. Regardless, even as nonsenses or only

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as nonsenses the way they can be “only shown” or performed to the best of our understanding the way they truly are, the nonsensical scenes so abundant in The Waste Land would, nonetheless, still speak so performatively not only in communicative visual images but also through “intermediary sensation”conveying silence in ways as The Waste Land so vividly indicates. Therefore, as often so ironically indicated by the text of The Waste Land itself as a poem so tenaciously alive with an ultimate message of hope, which remains so irreducibly inherent in life itself, we would still be hopeful, even if everything could stay as incommunicable of our common language in ways as Wittgenstein so puts it. Indeed, for Wittgenstein, our everyday common “language disguises [uncommon] thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.”54 Even so, the “clothing” would still communicate in ways as much as nonsenses and silence in the context of The Waste Land, regardless of how our “common” language is not as subtly designed as fit for anything private, such as our private sensations, according to Wittgenstein;55 it would still communicate, in other words, as much as the “intermediary sensation”-conveying sounds as Herder so argues, through their performance, appearance, or presence, which would perform to evoke, signal, or invoke something truly meaningful in ways otherwise utterly impossible. As discussed in the preface, with our mind slightly tilted from our usual focus on visual image and verbal message, we would even immediately find from behind such conspicuous “image of destruction” and message of despair the hidden sound message of hope that would remind us in the familiar sounds of echoes so reminiscent of our mothers’ always life-affirming heartbeats in the otherwise nonsensical sounding lullaby of “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” So would we discover from the sheer nonsenses the vividly communicable message of hope once we know how to shift adequately our habitual attention from logic, hierarchical order of syntax, and the sense-bewitching Homeric narrative sequence to “intermediary sensation,” “auditory imagination,” and the performative mind-boggling Hebraic nonsensical sounding narration often alive with mind-refreshing Gestalt impact. PIVOTAL ROLE OF FUNCTION WORDS IN MAINTAINING VISUAL QUALITY AND NARRATIVE RHYTHM However much philosophically in-depth as we would try hard to go, it would still be unlikely to yield any truly fruitful understanding of The Waste Land

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without our attention ultimately pivoted upon the language itself. Indeed, “Without philosophy,” as Wittgenstein so puts it, “thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct” and therefore philosophy’s “task is to make them clear and to find them sharp boundaries”56 because, ultimately, “[a]ll philosophy is a ‘critique of language.’”57 Our attention, in other words, must be adequately turned to the “reality of language” at least in ways as Wittgenstein and Herder would probably both suggest here with one emphasizing the importance of syntax, logic, the hidden visual impact that language works upon and with the other focusing on the “primitive wisdom”-suggesting and the “intermediary sensation”-conveying sounds of language. The issues of the reality of language must be not just about function words’ ever-present subtle but vital influences upon the texts in ways as indicated above in terms of the use of “and” and “the” in The Waste Land as “that.” “into,” and “by” used in Wright’s and Frost’s piece; the issues are rather also about how the function words’ subtle and vital influences could be appropriately made sense of in terms of the distinct lines of thought in ways as Wittgenstein and Herder each value; it would be particularly the case as regards the specific syntactically text-cementing power of function words, on the one hand, and phonemically verbal flowing resonating power, on the other. The primary example of the scenarios in this regard should be, once again, no other than the use of “and” that we initiate the discussion in the chapter with. Therefore, without the surreptitious power or agency of function words, such as “and,” it would be, in other words, utterly impossible for us to witness the serendipitous scenarios or impacts that “and” appears so instrumental in creating in the context of The Waste Land. “And” certainly often appears so instrumental not only in regulating the text for the impact of the text-enlivening and text-enlivened allusions but also so irreplaceable in making the text move around alive as if so immaculately pivoted upon something so essential but invisible from time to time from one place to another. As the cases with the rest of the parts, function words indeed remain so indispensable in maintaining the visual quality of narrative of The Waste Land often so rhythmically in display in ways so unique of itself, even if it does reveal many in common with Eliot’s other major poetic words, especially Four Quartets. This particular phenomenon could definitely be further understood, for instance, not only in terms of how function words, such as “and,” could be so specifically used in the live context as to occasion serendipitous verbal impact of transformation in ways as discussed above, but also in terms of how function words, such as “and,” “the,” “this,” “which is,” and “here is,” could be used so fruitfully together, even if in such utterly innocent or simply too normal to be noticeable commonplace scenario for meanings that may otherwise still remain hidden, that is, “Here is Belladonna, the Lady . . . / The lady . . . . / Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, / And here is

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. . .merchant, and . . . card, / Which is, / Which I am . . .n. Fear death by water. I see crowds . . . walking.” As also thus italicized in the line, this particular group verbal impact occasioned by means of the “innocent” use of commonplace function words could even be further observed at the same time along with the fluidity or coherence intensifying resonant sound impact so timely aroused in the w-alliterated verbal string occasioned together by the “flat common” words that share the w-sounds, such, as “walk,” “water,” “once,” “with,” and particularly the repeated appearance of “which.” Undoubtedly, in the line, function words, therefore, become so instrumental in enlivening the performative nature of language especially in terms of the narrative structure, rhythm, fluidity, and intensity that would make any textual component even as “trivial” as function words or phonemes as expressive as de facto allusions, a posteriori. Whether intended or not, with various textually occasioned verbal transformation that occurs simultaneously along with and against any preset categories of “figures of speech,” all these otherwise too trivial to be noticeable verbal elements would thus become such crucial de facto “meaningful” sensemaking allusions; even if as such trivial function words as “and” and “the,” they are, nonetheless, surreptitiously bestowed with the de facto power of contents words not only in making things connected but also in moving them around for narrative rhythm or “intermediary sensation,” which thus seems to suggest meanings in ways otherwise impossible. With such a verbal impact occasioned through the effective mediation or agency of function words, this line would therefore seem to suggest, for instance, how there is something meaningfully unusual or even ominously lurking behind and beneath these seemingly quite usual listing or itemization of anecdotes that could piece everything together in ways so naturally across or through the utterly discrete spatiotemporal boundaries. The anecdotes would become, in other words, such genuine, natural, involuntary allusions to the life-making “stream of consciousness” itself in ways as William James so visualizes it. Indeed, once again, as James so eloquently emphasizes, to acquire the “immediate feeling” or our direct experience with the true rhythms of life, as he thus indicates in Radical Empiricism, we should, for instance, take these little things, such as “the conjunctions,” as seriously “as primordial elements of ‘fact’ . . . the distinctions and disjunctions.”58 He explains how and why we should pay attention to things that appear as trivial or insignificant as “prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but’”59; it is because these otherwise insignificant verbal elements “compenetrate harmoniously” to make it possible for us to understand how life may “flow out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and . . . melt into it again as fluidly when

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we apply [the function words] to a new portion of the stream.”60 With these “innocent” or so contextually occasioned purely “accidental” allusions, we would also likely become “an unpremeditated and accidental philosopher,” as Montaigne would so suggest, to capture them alive for an adequate in-depth understanding of our worded world as much as the real world.61 In The Waste Land as in Eliot’s other poems, especially Four Quartets, the natural power or privilege of function words are particularly taken advantage of to let the collaborative and performative nature of language perform further effectively. In fact, however limited in number, function words could still significantly influence reading even with the sounds and tones they carry and vary. In this way, function words often quietly contribute to the rhythm, coherence, or even the overall flow of the text itself especially in terms of the privilege that they fully enjoy for being able to be more frequently repeatable than content words. As almost ubiquitous or ever-present as the fundamental text-making elements, function words in this capacity are certainly irreplaceable not only in making metric feet but also in possibly altering or reshaping meaning in the crucial but often barely noticeable ways. Indeed, by taking advantage of this collaborative and performative nature of language especially through its subtle but crucial and ever-present timely mediating agency of function words, The Waste Land could therefore flow naturally from inside out without having to be strictly confined to traditional poetic forms or patterns. These patterns could undoubtedly often prove to be too Procrustean for the Protean expressions so characteristic of The Waste Land, especially in terms of their restrictive syllabic counting and end rhyme setting schemes. However, in contrast with the extensive use of function words for parallelisms in Four Quartets, the comparatively rather controlled and measured use of function words in The Waste Land in suggesting subtle meaning-marking and meaning-making “intermediary sensation” should characterize how the performative nature of language is explored in The Waste Land in ways literally quite different from how it is explored in Four Quartets, especially in terms of the line as quoted above along with the imbedded allusions. In The Waste Land, the performative nature of language is explored to promote one to move rhythmically to pause and to ponder over the visualized message from time to time as from one allusion to another, whereas in Four Quartets, it is explored rather to let the readers feel rhythmically about the message while flowing along with the continuous flow of verbal music created through the extensive use of function words sustained and mediated parallelism with extended verbal strings. Even if, due to its specific narrative style in line with its narrative purpose, the text of The Waste Land is not as musically fluid as that of Four Quartets particularly as it is so heavily loaded with all its at once text-enriching and text-encumbering literary references and allusions, The Waste Lands still so perspicuously stands out as much meaningfully visual

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as it is occasionally musical. With so innumerous literary references and allusions brought along through all the peculiar visual messages in the live context of The Waste Land, the readers do often so constantly have to pause to ponder over each one of them with each and every step forward. Certainly, from time to time, there would also be occasions for one to dance a few quick steps, such as with all these “and”-linked lines in the first stanza as discussed earlier and will be discussed further in the following sections. However, unlike the seemingly incessant fluid verbal flows of Four Quartets, which tend to carry readers away with them, the momentary occasion of dancing to the rhythmic verbal flow in The Waste Land would often appear so quickly disrupted in such a way as if to force us to pause and ponder instantly as to why we dance, what makes us dance, where and how we dance, and what we dance to. Our attention would then be so quickly shifted to various allusionsrelated or references-aroused images and visualizable issues. All these suddenly emerged visualizable issues would often make us at once too excited or too mesmerized to be able to move even a single step further anymore. We would all then appear as if so instantly spellbound by the mind-bewildering meanings hidden behind, beneath, between, and even beyond the immediately sense-bewitching visual images so deceptively arising alive from the poetic rhythm that we dance to however momentarily. Undoubtedly, while Four Quartets could certainly be taken as the “rhythmic creation of [meaningful] beauty” that makes one constantly dance to its “virtuoso mastery verbal music,” The Waste Land would also be understood as the “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty,” which, however, often appears so immediately sense-bewitching and mind-bewildering to arouse the urge for us to want to dance to it but, at the same time, only to find ourselves so transfixed; we would become, in other words, so transfixed with all our due attention pivoted solely on the hidden messages behind the meaningful visual images that come out so rhythmically along with each and every allusion. Indeed, in the live literary context of The Waste Land, it is the function words that make all these literary references and allusions so at once obvious and obscure but in ways also so serendipitously maneuverable. The irreplaceable but surreptitious agency of function words undoubtedly make it so easy for the references and allusions to shift, often as swiftly as between a few lines or even a few words, from one different mode and mood to another particularly in relation with the constantly variable spatiotemporal settings as with different visual and sound images of heart and mind. In addition to the line just quoted in the preceding paragraph as above, here are once again also the lines as discussed in the beginning passage of the chapter about the speaker’s summer experiences, which could be made sense of as additional example. As clearly indicated in the lines, it is equally through the “and”-facilitated magic impact of

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“persistence of vision” that these “and”-mediated lines, especially those at the initial position of each line, not only convey the subtle but vital “intermediary sensation” of potentially infinite illusion or allusion of motion as “stream of consciousness” but also display such swift shifts of scenes as much naturally across otherwise utterly unconnected discrete time period and space as compatible only with the scenes in the artworks by artists, such as Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali. As if utmost at will, everything thus swiftly switches from one discrete scene to another across any given spatiotemporal boundary, and the “and” that makes the switches do function in this regard also as the natural allusions to the artists and their artworks, be they as intended or merely involuntary, especially for readers who are familiar with the artists and their artworks. With such quick shifts or switches from one mode to another as between the sense-bewitching poetic rhythm and the mind-bewildering illusions and allusions that the rhythm occasions or awakens in the process, reading The Waste Land does bring us such dangerous pleasure as if we were all dancing on the fields full of land mines or hidden swamps. CROSS-REFERENCE REGARDING PIVOTAL ROLE OF FUNCTION WORDS Indeed, as the hybrid text of The Waste Land itself so indicates, Eliot tends to rely so much on the existing literary contexts for his creative imagination inasmuch the same way as he needs the conventional prosodic “safety net” for his “poetic acrobatics.” Eliot, again, as Ackroyd so puts it, “always needed a safety net, as it were, before he indulged in his own acrobatics” because “an analysis of his prosody . . . shows that he took conventional metrical units as his essential pattern—he departs from, and then returns to, them.”62 The reason is clear because “the major form,” as Ackroyd acutely emphasizes, “can support irregularities, which are justified and ultimately controlled by the underlying order.”63 Indeed, “throughout his published work,” emphasizes Ackroyd, “there is evidence of an imagination which received with full force the impression of other writers’ forms and language, and which was then able to assimilate them within an original design.”64 Such indispensable reliance on literary contexts certainly explains Eliot’s propensity to draw allusions not only from across disciplines but also from across cultures in ways as so revealed in The Waste Land. If so, this peculiar reliance on literary contexts and prosodic “safe net” should also indicate how everything as if so uniquely experimented in the live context of The Waste Land must have its rather general referential significance worldwide to keep humanity in ways as much as Goethe so wished for, that is, away from so being bogged down or so “[d]

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estined, to see the illuminated, not the light.” Therefore, in this regard, this seemingly quite particular or simply peculiar exploration of the inexhaustible power of verbal transformation so inherent in function words and vividly revealed in The Waste Land and Eliot’s other works could be further made sense of through cross-reference with cases from other literary texts. The scenario, in other words, should by no means be so uniquely only of The Waste Land, however much as it might so appear at the first sight, especially because The Waste Land indeed remains as much a highly hybrid text as an infinitely interpenetrated void of living cultural and literary ecologies. In this regard, this scenario could so undoubtedly still remain hidden not only in all Eliot poems, such as in Four Quartets, but also in other literary texts, classic or popular, which would also happen to be so “coincidentally” referred to as some additional cases of significant allusive messages as Eliot himself might so intend through the agency of his “mon frère.” In addition to the use of “that” and “only” in James Wright’s “A Blessing” and “by” in Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” as mentioned above, there are simply other innumerous similar or compatible cases still remaining hidden in our familiar texts of Jeffrey Chaucer’s and Emily Dickinson’s, for instance. Indeed, peculiar as each case might be, the diverse scenarios of function words, however, often suggest a rather broad global phenomenon regarding how crucial a meaning-making role that function words actually play live, a posteriori, sometimes as the indispensable but barely noticeable “le mot juste.” There is, for instance, a compatible case from “the Miller’s Tale” of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the relative pronoun “who” and the preposition “with” are not only added for the required numbers of meter but also are stressed in such a way to convey the subtle shades of emphasis with a comic sense by slightly altering the usual iambic pattern. In the tale, a priest by the name of Absalom went out flirting with his neighbor Nicholas’s wife. He wanted a kiss on her lips but “fared neither better nor worse than with his mouth to kiss her naked arse with much relish” because she fooled him by sticking out of the window not her lips but her buttocks while “the night was as pitch or coal.” When Absalom eventually realized what he had actually done, he became such a furious person, “who now rubs, who wipes his lips / With dust, with sand, with straw, with cloth, with chips.”65 We can certainly read the sentences especially the second part, as usual, as regular iambic pentameter, with stress on the content words. But if we let stress fall on the preposition “with” and pause for a prolonged duration, the rhythm would become so “syncopated” to suggest a further dramatically light-hearted humorous effect. As of a typical trochaic meter and with stress falling repeatedly on “with” this way, the sentence, therefore, sounds, in other words, quite jazz-like or syncopated to convey effectively the subtly comic sense that the situation is so intended.

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So is it the case with Emily Dickinson. Indeed, a “function word” in a dictionary usually indicates a limited number of conjunction, preposition, article, some of the adverbs, or typically any word with virtually little lexical meaning but mere syntactic function. Quite often, in Dickinson’s texts as in Eliot’s and Chaucer’s, the concept or the “meaning” of “meaningless” function word appears so subtly redefined live, a posteriori. As a result, there are indeed far too many possibilities of reading the same poem by Dickinson, especially in terms of the peculiar syntactic-prosodic pattern, which simultaneously enlivens and is enlivened by function words that text surreptitiously pivots upon and around; it is in this verbal environment where Dickinson’s versatile and often chameleon-like “I” often appears fully situated as the ever-present and the irreducible human agency whether right on the spot or subtly behind the scene. The “I”-mediated and function word-facilitated possible shift of metric pattern may even occur in a critical moment to have an utterly unexpected dramatic or climactic effect by disrupting an otherwise quite predicable normal flow of iambic pattern in ways the following poem shows. In the poem “The Service without Hope—Is tenderest, I think—Because ‘tis unsustained By stint—Rewarded Work— / Has impetus of Gain—And impetus of Goal—There is no Diligence like that That knows not an Until—,”66 indeed, as Cristanne Miller notices, Dickinson apparently uses the function words, such as “without,” “Because,” and “By” to establish and qualify the relation of service to hope with the second stanza that proceeds through “of,” “of,” “here,” “like,” “that,” and “That” to build up, probably quite deceptively or ironically, the “absolute connection (or lack of connection)”67 until the poem reaches its seemingly climactic moment. The poem then appears to be reified with the “substantive” nominalization of the crucial preposition “Until,” which in turn substantiates an infinitely open-ended process.68 This implicit or subtle sense of “absolute connection (or lack of connection),” however, is literally built upon an abrupt disruption of an ongoing iambic pattern and a surreptitious shift to a trochaic pattern at the very end of the last line. As a result, while the poem may appear flowing smoothly in a quite normal iambic pattern facilitated by all these function words, this seemingly habitual or, in Miller’s words, even “to some extent . . . predictable”69 flow is suddenly cut short. The initial “that” of the last line in the poem could most likely initiate a trochaic pattern that reverses the iambic meter for the dramatic open-ended conclusion with the nominalization of the most crucial function word, “Until.” The “that” which ends the second of the last line literally forces the initial “that” of the last line to be stressed and thus starts a trochaic pattern, which suggests a subtle drama of acute sense of self-consciousness. The poem thus builds up its “absolute connection” or “lack of connection” not only through the reified or “substantive” nominalization of “Until” but also with such an awakened sense of self-consciousness as indicated by the jazz-like trochaic

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syncopation. This trochaic last line in turn substantiates an infinitely openended process by means of so abruptly disrupting an otherwise rather regular iambic pattern built upon the predictable narrative rhythm or pace sustained through all the function words, especially those headed the lines deceptively leading the way. So is also the case here with one of Dickinson’s most famous pieces “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—.” The poem provides further evidence regarding the issue. For instance, what makes the last line of this poem so memorable especially in terms of how it perfectly parallels with the first sentence with a climactic revelation concerning why the poet or her persona’s “Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” and why it may “have but the power to kill / Without the power to die.” Here is the poem, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—In Corners—till a Day The Owner passed—identified— / And carried Me away— / And now We roam in Sovereign Woods— / And now We hunt the Doe— / And every time I speak for Him—The Mountains straight reply— / And do I smile, such cordial light Upon the Valley glow—It is as a Vesuvian face Had let its pleasure through— / And when at Night—our good Day gone—I guard My Master’s Head—‘Tis better than the Eider-Duck’s Deep pillow—to have shared— / To foe of His—I ‘m deadly foe—None stir the second time—On whom I lay a Yellow Eye—Or an emphatic Thumb— / Though I than He—may I longer live He longer must—than I— / For I have but the power to kill, Without—the power to die—Though I than He—may longer live He longer must—than I / For I have but the power to kill, / Without—the power to die—.” The power of the famous poem does seem to result from its use of the “content words,” such as “stood,” which could suggest an action with a probably at once relaxed and intense state of certain unknown duration. The word “to kill” also suggests a momentary or repeated action with a fatal result, which may even bear some further extended consequences, whereas the word “to die” indicates an occasion, an outcome, a repeated action, or a process. These content words make the poem appear like a desperate outcry for the indispensable but impossible freedom that the persona desires in order to think or to make a decision for herself, by herself, and thus for her to become herself or simply live a life out of her own personal imitative, her own free will, choice, and preference. These content words with all the possible verbal implications as so suggested further indicate, through each and every specific occasion, activity, or event, the unbearable acute selfconsciousness and frustration with regard to the seemingly perpetual state of being stuck as such a capable “slave” or powerful “tool” for the owner but with not even a slightest tint of light ever to be seen in the tunnel for a life of her own “self.” However, with a second glance, no matter how eyecatching the content words could possibly be the ways they appear, what

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makes the poem truly remarkable, however, may not necessarily even be so much because of these content words that the initial line pivots upon while making a clear-cut “metaphor” of the perspicuous image of a gun; it is rather because of the otherwise too common to be noticeable function words, particularly “ands” at the initial position, which punctuate action, set up rhythm, suggest atmospheric mood and deceptive tendency or potential onto infinite, and lead the poem surreptitiously to the utmost ironic moment with such a dramatically anticlimactic climax as indicted by the pivotal preposition “without” of the last line. A PICTURE OF VOID THAT PICTURES THE INCOMMUNICABLE PICTURE OF REALITY Clearly, as often so indicated throughout the live text of The Waste Land, regardless of how far we would like to go philosophically as much as prosodically to dig into the text for the message of hope as it would so often appear tantalizingly alive or inherent therein, we would, however, sooner or later reach the rock hard bottom of all the issues that we have explored so far, that is, the bottomless sphere of void. Whichever way we choose to move around, against, or according to it, we would then have to reexamine every issue that we encounter so far for its utmost validity, be it of Homeric or Hebraic mode of narratology, the heard or unheard melodies, being or unbeing, meaning or nonsenses, visual or auditory modes of imagination, sound or silence; we must indeed thus reexamine every issue, be it of the infinite power of our imagination or of the uncanny limit of our common natural language along with its usually overstated narrative and descriptive power at the expense of its often overlooked performative function in ways as the text of The Waste Land so reveals to us; we would therefore, in other words, must also try to spot issues otherwise overlooked, especially the ones of the hidden performative power of language, which would in turn shine on the sound message of hope inherent in any conspicuous “image of destruction” and ostentatious message of despair. Indeed, the performative function of language would so often remain hidden or barely noticeable in the formal literary texts that prioritize the narrative and descriptive power of language that appear so readily make sense. However, in a text as hybrid as The Waste Land, there is not only enough void as space to allow different modes of narrative to coexist but also sufficient void as leeway to encourage them to compete with one another to result in the unusual fluidity and flexibility so characteristic of The Waste Land to make it further possible for the poem to flow as naturally from inside out as virtually unbounded by any formal formality in any arbitrary way. The hybrid text certainly thus makes

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it further possible for the poem to bypass from time to time the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements, grouped together into a system,” which, once so arbitrarily preset in “the order of things,” would so readily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.”70 The same hybrid text would even transform these nonrepresentational formal factors, such as “meaningless” function words into efficient meaningful elements even with the de facto power of personification in ways as previously discussed. In this way, the otherwise hidden performative power of language would therefore have enough void as a room of its own to emerge so serendipitously with impact in ways as commonly referred to “A picture [that performs] is worth thousands of words.” Indeed, in the hybrid text, problems often mean fruitful opportunity or hope of solution. It is certainly a common phenomenon with the hybrid text, that is, no sooner had the poem started from the very beginning than the persona “I” would find himself as if already locked up in an incommunicable state of limbo, of which there is apparently not any appropriate tongue for the persona even to express himself with; the speaker “I” is therefore quite empathetically stuck in the incommunicable state of void being “neither / Living nor dead” with nothing else to rely on but “silence” as only sense or sanity-maintaining “the heart of light”; it is, however, exactly this state of being that Wittgenstein would call as purely nonsensical or verbally incommunicable state that would perform profusely the dilemma in a communicative way; it is, in other words, only by the means of such a picture “only shown, not said” of the verbally incommunicable that the dilemma of incommunicability would thus so ironically communicate in ways so profusely that we could all feel it. These lines as quoted above therefore suggest not simply how nonsenses communicate but how silence also speaks through “what[ever] we cannot speak about [and therefore] we must pass [it] over in silence” whenever or wherever necessary.71 The “meaning” of nonsenses or the verbally incommunicable would then be thus truly performed, conveyed, and made sense of collaboratively by the readers as the speaker “I”’s “mon semblable,—mon frère!” who would be so instantly “motivated” or “aroused” to share the ennui, spleen, uneasiness, or all nonverbally communicable but real nonsensical emotion or mental anguish inasmuch the same way as the audience of Waiting for Godot do.72 Undoubtedly, when Wittgenstein emphasizes how “when we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,” he probably means exactly as Zhuangzi, Laozi, and Zen Buddhist masters usually do in letting silence speak the utterly unutterable. Eliot’s view of “being and un-being” and the “meaningful” and the “nonsensical,” indeed, also seems to coincide, in this regard, with what Feng You-lan in The History of Chinese Philosophy says of Seng Zhao 僧肇,

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a brilliant but short-lived Chinese Buddhist-Daoist monk of the early fifth century (384–414) and reputedly the spiritual founder of Chinese Chan (or Zen in Japanese). However, what remains so essential of Seng, according to Feng, is how Seng makes us see “being and non-being do not involve an antithesis” but in a true synesthetic/synaesthetic state of being, which partakes of both “you 有 (there is)” and “wu 無 (there is not)” but resembles none of them as a state of the real unknown in such a way that exposes how our existing system of categorization is really “Caught in the form of limitation / Between un-being and being” (FQ I, v). Of this “unexpected” scenario, there would come no better solution other than for us to stay simply as quiet or silent in ways as Wittgenstein and Zhuangzi both might so emphasize on the matter unless by means of artistically performative language in ways as much as the parodical state of being so indicates in The Waste Land as through the paradoxically performative image of the “Chinese jar,” which, as it is so suggested in Four Quartets, “still / Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ I, v). It is because for Seng, as Feng emphasizes, “the true aspect of things is that they neither exist nor non-exist, or, one may also say, they both exist and do not exist” unless, as Eliot might also suggest, by the aesthetic means of poetry. Seng’s idea, according to Feng, as does Eliot’s here, clearly goes against “the popular view of ‘non-being,’” which means simply “that there is nothing there, and of ‘being,’ that there is really and truly something there” and thus suggests the possibility of seeing things not just in between but also beyond the very betweenness.73 Like Seng, what Eliot is thus inclined to see in The Waste Land as much as in Four Quartets is indeed such an infinitely rich state of void “beyond good and evil” or likewise beyond any simple measure for us to make sense of what is supposedly meaningful and nonsensical in ways so as usual “Caught in the form of limitation / Between un-being and being.” With the performative language so explored with the one single protagonist-narrator in the hybrid text as spacious as the immeasurably deep and interpenetrated void of cultural and spiritual ecologies, does not Eliot at least in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets try to bypass the “form of limitation / Between un-being and being” as much as he does with the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements”? Does he not probably even try to transform them to his advantage inasmuch the same way as he does try to turn the meaningless formal elements, such as function words, into meaningful text-making factors? Does he not, to say the least, try to explore the text for the maximum extent of void as the unlimited spatiotemporal space, leeway, or vacant spots to move freely around at least to keep himself from being caught or remaining torn apart with a hierarchically dichotomic form of limitation that leaves not much room, if at all, between sheer unbeing and being? Also, with Eliot’s extensive and intensive effort understood in this way as he

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tries to make the best of the performative nature of language in spite of our common language’s natural limitation, this very effort of his could, perhaps, quite reasonably be further made sense of in terms of the famous dialogue in the seventeenth chapter of The Zhuangzi between Zhuangzi and Huizi along the bank of the River Hao. When Huizi, for instance, challenges Zhuangzi with the point-blank question, “You are not a fish. How do you know that fishes are happy?” upon Zhuangzi’s spontaneous observation of how happy the fishes are swimming in the river. Teasingly, Zhuangzi thus replies, “You are not me. How do you know that I don’t know that fishes are happy in the river?” and “[by the way] I know it from here.” With the simple answer “from here,” Zhuangzi literally underlies two indispensable conditions, upon which all human communication must be grounded to be feasible in the first place. The first certainly indicates the natural and human environment as on this very spot, at this very moment, with this particular person for conversation, and under this particular circumstance, and in this particularly nice weather and mood. The second concerns the fundamental issue of language itself regarding how language could literally function only in such irreconcilable ways that at once conditions and confines communication. It is apparent that language makes it possible for Huizi to challenge Zhuangzi by allowing him to form a question, “How do you know that fishes are happy in the river?” also limits what he wants and can say. Literally, the way that Huizi is allowed to formulate his questions also limits his expression. By asking “how do you know,” Huizi seems to grant in spite of himself that Zhuangzi knows or “has already known,” even though what he actually means is that Zhuangzi does not know or that it is utterly impossible for him to know. Meanwhile, the question itself is also quite ambiguous if not utterly contradictory because it can be simultaneously understood also in two completely conflicting but also complementary ways. First, it could be understood, for instance, as a purely rhetorical question that means “you don’t know” or simply “it is impossible for you to know.” Still, it could also be interpreted literally as a serious request for urgent information regarding whether or how Zhuangzi really knows.74 With the questions and answers appearing as nicely formulable in terms of the basic standards by which Wittgenstein literally differentiates meaningful propositions from nonsenses. This humorous scenario should by no means be considered as blatantly nonsensical as it might otherwise appear because “If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.”75 Clearly, “when [Huizi] tries to raise doubts [he has formulated] questions [the way grammatically permissible and thus] can be asked”76 in such a way, as Wittgenstein so insists, his “doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”77 Still, there is the inevitable loophole in ways that Huizi must formulate his question the only way allowed in terms of the

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common mechanism of language, which however not only undercut what he actually means but also cut open so commonly a loophole to allow the continuation of the conversation only in the form of ridicule and skepticism, which can never be shrugged off, ad infinitum, however much it also thus inevitably communicates, as “nonsense,” in spite of the speaker himself. With this anecdote of the formal linguistic loophole inherent in our common language kept readily alive in mind, what Eliot tries to do in The Waste Land through his remarkable exploration of the performative nature of language by means of performative nonsenses and silence could, once again, indeed, thus indicate how he tries not to be or to remain torn apart with such a form of limitation that recognizes no space, if at all, even for imagination, between the so-called un-being and being” as between what is supposedly good and evil as what is presumably meaningful and nonsocial; he tries to go beyond, in other words, the very dilemma so inherent in the language that would enable one to speak but only in ways it allows. This therefore should be as much the scenario as Eliot himself might have been so keenly aware of himself in terms of the risk for him to become at any moment “caught in the form of limitation” or literally the “formal” loophole in the form of formulable questions and answers that allow conversation or any verbal communication to continue in the first place in ways as the river dialogue so acts out. CONCLUSION: TEXT AS MEANINGFUL VOID OF INTERPENETRATED LIVING CULTURAL ECOLOGIES Ultimately, with all its infinitely performative meaning-tantalizing “riddles,” nonsenses, and silence, the highly hybrid text of The Waste Land always remains a special void of “network” as deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies. Regardless of whether, how, or how much this special power or potential of the void would be eventually made sense of, it could still be appreciated as the undeniable hidden force of textual reality that would often suddenly emerge from behind, beneath, and even between all these at once sensuously sense-bewitching and mind-bewildering allusions. This hidden force of textual or verbal reality would often come to life along with the allusions through the specific sounds and visual impacts or special primordial wisdom-conveying “intermediary sensations” particularly through the everpresent mediation of function words that always remain hidden but alive in the surreptitious and constant process of verbal transformation. As the infinite source or matrix so reminiscent of the “negative capability” with its allabsorbing and inexhaustible potential, the void provides space, leeway, and background for meaning to emerge, to grow, to transform, to perform, to echo through variable meaningful visual and sound impacts. In the highly hybrid

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text the way The Waste Land is, meaning would emerge, in other words, from behind, beneath, and between the clefts, cracks, chasms, fissures, or “the crude joints” of each word as from the immeasurable matrix of a void that allows life to “grow out of stony rubbish” as much as to sprout from “under the shadow of this red rock,” or from “[t]hat corpse . . . planted last year in [the] garden.” However, it is as much through function words as through the function words-mediated “intermediary sensation”-conveying “the form, the pattern” that literally makes the hybrid text really alive with its life-affirming sound message of hope echoing from behind the usual “image of destruction” and message of despair. The function words enable the special sound message to echo or to perform with the undying or unperishable message of hope in ways that can make words or music stands like a Chinese jar so perfectly in its perpetual motionless motion to be so reflective of the timely timeless time in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. Through the indispensable agency of function words in this way, the same form or pattern, however, further indicates how the “negative capability” of void carries as much from within itself as from the thinking-sustaining motion and picture-making power inherent in words for the special impacts of “philosophical imagination” in ways as Michèle Le Dœuff so often refers to as special “thinking images.”78 Indeed, for Wittgenstein, thinking and imagination are simply such an inseparable natural process of human cognition because “a proposition is a picture of reality” and “a proposition is a model of reality as we imagine.”79 Even our “thought” by nature, as Wittgenstein further emphasizes, “is proposition with a sense,”80 let alone, ultimately, “the possibility of all imaginary, of all our pictorial modes of expression, is contained in the logic of depiction.”81 However, even so, Le Dœuff would still thus specifically reminds us how the text of The Waste Land often reveals its special power as “philosophical imaginary,” with which there would not even be such a need as to emphasize how things utterly irreconcilable would eventually become reconcilable; it is simply because “a picture” of despair is always as much inseparable from “a picture” of hope as are “myth and dream” that always overlap upon each other, regardless of how the picture of hope could so often remain eclipsed by the picture of despair. Consequently, all the otherwise possible scenarios of “mighty opposites”82 could then even be seen as much naturally integrated or simply integrable in the text of The Waste Land, which could so ironically emerge as such natural “locations where thought in images is in some sense at home,” however variable and hybrid in forms as it might be.83 Neither would there in the text of The Waste Land be “conversely” in any way such a necessity to “offer [any] analysis of the imaginary component [as] within scientific work, whose final aim is it extradite an element judged alien and undesirable, and assign it a residence of elsewhere.”84

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Indeed, the text of The Waste Land often seems to show how, through this kind special power, be it called “negative capability,” “philosophical imaginary,” or “informed imagination,” the “mighty opposites” would always become so naturally “dissolve[[ed], diffuse[ed], dissipate[ed]”85 into such infinitely meaningful void as “strands of [deeply] interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” with the imaginary operating in places where, in principle, they supposedly do not belong and yet where without them, nothing would have been accomplished.86 Undoubtedly, with such special power remaining in operation, there would be, in other words, no such an urgent need for the “struggle[s] to idealize and to unify” anything “in order to re-create,” nor would there be any spot or place in it “where this process is rendered impossible.”87 Furthermore, along the same line of thought, “Language,” certainly as Saussure so emphasizes, “can also be compared with a sheet of paper.”88 For him, “thought is the front and the sound the back; one cannot cut the front without cutting the back at the same time.” Then, “likewise in language” as Saussure further emphasizes, “one can neither divide sound from thought nor thought from thought.”89 However, after an extended postmodern period of “the sound and fury” with the fierce deconstructive critique of “logocentrism” as much as “phonocentrism” that supposedly goes along with it, this inseparability of thought and sound appears making further sense especially in terms of the live context of The Waste Land as much as Four Quartets. However, in this regard, “a grain of salt in water” as a frequently appearing analogy from the Upanishads could probably be an even more “accurate” analogy than “a sheet of paper” in suggesting the inseparability of the two. Therefore, as these issues so indicate, the text of The Waste Land should then indeed be somewhat understood as the enriched void of deeply and infinitely interpenetrated living cultural ecologies that invite interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches at least in ways as the first part so indicates. If so, this particular power of void, be it taken as “negative capability,” “informed imagination,” “philosophical imaginary,” could certainly be approached in the light of the concept of “womb” as often so suggested with reference to Dao in the image of a deep valley in terms of all its infinite power of receptivity, vastness, and vacancy. Is it not thus said in both the sixth and fifteenth chapters how “Great Mother” is as “empty but inexhaustible” in “giv[ing] birth to infinite worlds”? What The Waste Land offers is indeed this tenaciously soft and all-absorbing and all-generating power of void, with which there are as many occasions for hope as with despair. In this regard, the ultimate benefits as we might gain from this modernist poetic world is what The Waste Land vividly enlivens, that is, the significant revelation of the infinite presence and the everlasting influence of the meaning-absorbing and meaning-generating void as such deeply interpenetrated hybrid text of living cultural ecologies; it is particularly so especially in terms of its use of

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hundreds of literary references and allusions that could so often be at once conflicting and complementary as much as mutually illuminating. In this way, the text of The Waste Land does not allow any piece of great literary works, such as itself, to be treated merely as a finite product; instead, it would encourage any great piece of literature to be treated as much adequately as an infinite meaning-making and beauty-making process through this particular void especially in ways as Erick Auerbach and C. G. Jung would both so insist; it means for any great piece of literary texts to be appropriately treated not only in terms of the often at once conflicting and complementary Homeric and Hebraic narrative traditions that make up the Western narratology but also with reference to the contrasting differences between the first and the second part of Goethe’s Faust. This is exactly what The Waste Land would thus teach us not only in terms of the modernist poetics but also in terms of the traditional literary materials, values, and fundamental principles that it itself bases upon particularly those of the tenacity of life and humanity. All of these could literarily mean for Eliot, again, in words from Peter Ackroyd, as “a safety net” that “[Eliot] always needed,” very much “as it were, before he indulged in his own [poetic] acrobatics” because he would take the “conventional metrical units [along with all the inherent values therein] as his essential pattern—he departs from, and then returns to, them.”90 All these values as the text of The Waste Land so reveals would then certainly so always tenaciously enrich and remain enriched by the ever-present and all-inclusive crucible of void as the deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies. This is indeed how we must read and understand The Waste Land and, through it, the modernist literature, as a whole. In this way, the illuminated text of The Waste Land itself would simultaneously become so illuminating for us to avoid in ways the best we can the same sad scenario that Goethe so often deplores as in Pandora, that is, how we humans always appear as if so forever hopelessly doomed or “[d]estined, to see the illuminated, not the light.”

NOTES 1. Foucault, The Order of Things, 235. 2. See Roger T. Ames, “Taking Confucian Religiousness on its own Terms,” International Comparative Literature, 1, no. 1 (2018). 3. Wang, Yinyang, 138. 4. https://www​.sparknotes​.com​/poetry​/eliot​/section4/. 5. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 103, 45e. 6. The source of this citation is Proust “La Prisonnière,” see Remembrance of Things Past (or In Search of Lost Time) (Vol. 5), trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff; Chapter: II (The Verdurins Quarrel with M. de Charlus).

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7. Emerson, “Nature,” 6. 8. The rigidity and flexibility issue regarding function word could probably be further examined in terms of the intricate relationship between the so-called normal stress and emphatic stress. Thus, however “normally” the “and” in the sentence “John says that he is a communist and that he admires Mrs. Thatcher,” for instance, “is not to be stressed,” it still could be stressed because, as a matter of fact, not only “anything can receive emphatic stress” including even syllables such as “I said reflate, not inflate” but also “wherever emphatic stress occurs in a sentence, it over-rules normal stress” (Richard Hogg and C. B. McCully, Metrical Phonology: A Coursebook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 3–4) (Ibid.). The reason is that “emphatic stress seems usually to be connected with pragmatic factors” and, “being pragmatically based,” emphatic stress thus “does not pay attention to syntactic categories in any strictly definable way” (Ibid., 3). Naturally, as long as there is any slight element of surprise, doubt, disbelief, and so on, regarding how it could be possible for John to admire Mrs. Thatcher as a communist, the normally unstressed “and” in the above sentence, as a result, becomes stressed. Ultimately, since “the primary task of emphatic stress is to draw attention to events, objects, beliefs, etc. which the speaker feels are especially worthy of note” (Ibid., italics added), is there anything else that could not be, in other words, so pragmatically stressed however otherwise regulated theoretically? 9. Revised and Standard Version (Meridian, 1974). 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Indeed, as Wittgenstein so discusses in Philosophical Investigations, “And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same as obeying it” (Ibid., 202, 81e) and “The individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language” (243, 89e). 13. In addition to the cases of creation narratives we are familiar with as regards The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Upanishads, Rousseau’s ingenious accounts, as usual, of the origins of language and the inequalities of human civilization would always be mind-refreshing. As it may strike us as his usual involuntary sidekicks, this unique need for the humanity-defining or civilization-becoming companionship and communication, in fact, also appears as Rousseau’s major focus in “Origin of Language” and “Origin of Human Inequality.” As in the latter, human civilization or “inequality,” for Rousseau, starts with communication and manipulatable companionship. When someone who is shrewd enough to pick up a rock and put it down on the ground to mark a place and declare “This is mine!” and then to find another human foolish enough to be so persuaded to believe in him. This is, as Rousseau puts it, the beginning of human civilization and the origin of human inequality. Civilization therefore starts immediately with communication for persuasion to materialize the world through words. Still, in his usual profoundly simplistic way, Rousseau recounts his theme on the “origin of language.” Also, if to form a society requires at least two

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persons, whether on equal or unequal terms, it nonetheless must proceed through communication. Imagine someone, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who lives completely alone for a long time, until his sudden encounter with his friend and slave Friday or someone else in the jungle. He would then be, as Rousseau suggests, as surprised as if running into a monster. “This is a giant!” he then immediately cries out. However, the other person may not actually be any taller or bigger than this scared speaker. This false factual statement thus not only truthfully reveals the inner feeling of the speaker but also marks the beginning of civilization. The rest certainly needs to be settled through further communication regarding who will be actually in charge. The first human society is thereby, according to Rousseau, built in this way upon communication or even miscommunication. See Paragraph Three of Chapter Three of “Essay on the Origin of Language.” 14. Jay Parini, Jesus: The Huma Face of God (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013), 69–71. However, as indicated in the initial two lines of Daodejing, “The Dao that can be spoken of is not the eternal Dao; the word that can be said is not the eternal word,” the necessity for us to use parables as the necessity for us to use our common language, which is so metaphorical by nature, often indicates in the first place the almost insurmountable difficulty, if not utmost impossibility, for real communication and inevitable miscommunication and misunderstanding. This is particularly the case in terms of our understanding of the great and the divine, which could be always such a daunting and yet irresistible challenge in ways as much as the great who must make themselves to be possibly understood by the ordinary. The scenario, in fact, is quite imaginable with regard to the stories we are all so familiar with. No humanity at the prelapsarian age of Adam and Eve, for instance, could really understand the postlapsarian meaning of death as the consequence of disobedience. Could a toddler ever understand the serious meaning of “death”? Neither would Siddhartha Gautama be able to comprehend the real nature and condition of human suffering until he ventures out of the gate of his secluded palace; nor would even the new message, such as the “sermon on the mount,” be truly understood by the public in general prior to the martyrdom or sacrifice that brings the substantial meaning to it in the form of crucifixion. This is also why, instead of the accurate plain language he uses when he communicates with his disciples, Jesus, when speaking to the public, has to use “figures of speech,” that is, the “parables,” the expedient metaphorical language, at the risk of miscommunication or misunderstanding of his new message; there would be the inevitable margins of error that would result from the use of the figurative language, even if the “parables” apparently stand for the only common language accessible to the general public; the more parables are used, the more margins of errors would accumulate. As I have argued several times elsewhere, this way that the language works, especially so meteorically, as “parables,” could indeed be as much “illuminating” as misleading. Imagine how it would be possible to let a person who is born blind and has never been able to see the sun. If you try make him to “see” the sun so “figuratively” as the only possible way by letting him touch a disk because the sun is round in shape in addition to letting him feel the burning fire because the sun radiates with heat, he would then probably utter it to himself “This is the sun” any time when he touches anything round and/or anything that burns. This is why in

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Summa Theologica, in line with a deep-rooted prophetic tradition of all Abrahamic religions, St. Thomas Aquinas emphasizes how the margins of errors accumulate due to the imperfect means of human interpretation of the eternal law through humanly comprehensible natural law and human law and how timely correction would inevitably occur through the revelation of the divine law from time to time by prophets, such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad; they would try to reregulate human conducts by means of reinterpreting the eternal law through the divine law as revealed in Ten Commandments, Sermons on the Mount, and Koranic message; they would thus reduce or clear of the margins of error at least to an acceptable level. Here is thus also a quite compatible scenario with Jesus’ use of parables regarding what Gautama Buddha, too, has to deal with while communicating with the general public, according to Seng Zhao, “Therefore, when he has in mind the final truth (paramartha satya), he says that (things) do not move; when he teaches conventional truth (laukika satya), he says that everything flows” (Chao Lun, The Treaties of S­ eng-chao, 2nd ed. trans. Walter Liebenthal (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1968), 50). Furthermore, for the same reason not to be arbitrarily “appropriated,” the great minds have to keep distance from their “followers,” Emerson, for instance, has to stay away from the “transcendentalists” and even Henry David Thoreau, because they all tend to “apply” so radically his ideas and thoughts, Emerson, as Henry James noted, has no choice but to defy, defer, and deter whatever he is so often taken for granted with such “endless disclaimers and explanations: ‘I am not the man you take me for’” (James, “Memoir,” 224). So does Karl Marx, according to Franz Mehring in Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), must also try hard to keep distance from all so-called “Marxists” of his time especially those with “semi-scholarly Philistine fantasies.” In Twilight of the Idols/The AntiChrist, Nietzsche indicates how he respects Jesus but resents Christianity. For Confucius, his best students are only those, such as Yan Hui, who repeat him least. For Zen Master Linji Yixuan 臨濟義玄, the founder of Rinzai school, what should we do with all the sages who block our minds as they block our ways? “Kill them all,” that is his definitive reply because he is known for having advised his disciples, “Whenever you run into a Buddha on your way, kill him; whenever you run into any elder of yours, kill him, too” (逢佛殺佛, 逢祖殺祖). For Henry James’ observation of Emerson, see “A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Elliot Cabot,” in Henry James the Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, 1987. 15. The same scenario, for instance, occurs in Dream of Red Chamber from a Daoist-Buddhist cosmic view as it is remarkably displayed in the first chapter, which accounts for the making of the universe. This is virtually a Chinese version of Genesis in the hand of a Chinese mythological goddess followed by the hierarchically complementary work of collaboration between a Buddhist Monk and Daoist priest; they have to work together to deal with a certain unexpected issue as in Genesis of an otherwise impeccable process of creation; they also have to deal with, in other words, an autogenerative narrative pattern in which a new round of narrative will begin where another ends in a recurrent chiastic structure that makes the universe a forever renewable and unending process of narrative, with which, indeed, we can thus understand the tenacious message of hope inherent as much in The Waste Land as in

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Four Quartets as regards how, indeed, “In my beginning is my end” (EC i) and “my end is my beginning” (EC v) and “What we call the beginning is often the end /And to make an end is to make a beginning” (LG v). 16. https://wasteland​.windingway​.org​/31​/frisch​-weht​-der​-wind. 17. It is particularly the case with Chinese and the strategically most important or emphasized position of each line is always the end position as “重中之重” (zhòng zhōng zhī zhòng) especially in terms of Chinese poetry. Of the same sources, this phenomenon could probably be best understood in terms of this often mentioned case. When a certain military commander of Qing dynasty had to present his case to the emperor after having lost one battle after another, he prepared his presentation with this famous statement of fact as “臣屢戰屢敗” (chén lǚ zhàn lǚ bài), which means “Every time I fought, I lost.” But he was advised to revise the statement with a simple reversal of word order. So instead of stating his case as “屢戰屢敗” (lǚ zhàn lǚ bài),” he described his situation as “屢敗屢戰” (lǚ bài lǚ zhàn), which means “Every time I lost, I fought again.” So the emperor was very pleased by his courage and tenacity. It is because with “fought” (戰 zhàn) instead of “lost” (敗 bài) put at the end of the sentence, the strongest position of a sentence in Chinese, “the last of being the strongest” (最後的最強),” as Zhao Yuanren, 趙元任 (1892–1982) so sums up, what became automatically stressed or emphasized in the revised statement was the message on the general’s unyielding courage and tenacity. Otherwise, the general’s incompetence as a military commander, among many other negative possibilities, would have become the central message in the original word order. But, when translating the sentence 屢敗屢戰 into English, there seems to be no better alternative than adding the word “again” to bring out the emphatic flavor, which is, however, so naturally there in the word order of the original Chinese version. While explaining why the last word of each line in a Chinese poem is where not only a pause but also a rhyme is expected as below, Zhu also touches on the same issue. “In most Chinese poems one ‘sentence’ (line) forms a unit. A pause at the last word of each sentence is necessary for the pattern of both sound and meaning. In case of occasional run-on line (enjambment), such a pause is still required even if just for the sake of sound not meaning. The last word of the sentence is thus where a pause is absolutely expected; it is therefore the most important position regarding a poem’s overall rhythmic and metric pattern” (中文詩大半每 “句” 成一單位, 句末一字在音義兩方面都有停頓的必要. 縱然偶有 “上下關聯格” 者,句末一字義不頓而音仍必須頓. 句末一字是中文詩句必頓的一个字, 所以它是全詩音節最着重的地方) (Zhu, Meixue Wenji, Vol. 2, 175). As a result, it makes perfect sense why the last words of Chinese poems are expected to be rhymed; it is because each last word stands for the strategic position for the meaningful prosodic coherence and unity otherwise impossible, or, in other words, a place where the sound and meaning hit the brain more memorably than anywhere else in the same line. See Chen, Chapter 5 of Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody; see also Feng, Interactions between Morphology, 59; Studies on Chinese Prosodic Grammar, 82. 18. As will be discussed in chapter 5, the scenario of the untranslatable “intermediary sensation” so subtle and vital in making poetry poetry, that is, as “the dictionary

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of the soul,” in ways as Herder so puts it, could be further observed in terms the Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied,” especially in terms of the invaluable agency of sounds, function words and word order, among others, in the making process in the German original. Über allen Gipfeln lst Ruh’, In allen Wipfeln Spürest du Kaum eine Hauch; Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde. Warte nur! balde Ruhest du auch.

On all the hilltops there is peace, In all the treetops you feel Hardly any breeze; The birds are quiet in the woods. Just wait, soon You too will be in peace.

Whatever poetic impact this little masterpiece may suggest, everything of the poem is so much contingent upon the indispensable but “quiet” support of function words. Literally, the poem’s synesthetic subtlety could be especially identified prosodically in line with auch, the last word of the last line. This crucial last line seems to suggest how everything may finally quiet down inasmuch the same way as the “h-sounding” word auch may so suggest especially in accordance with the metric pattern of the poem where the words with soothing vowel and consonant sounds all come in resonant chords of echoes, such as “Ruh,” “Spurest,” “Ruhest,” “du,” “hauch,” and “auch.” The function words here, such as “über,” “im,” also carry the meaning-enriching and beauty-enlivening vowels and consonant sounds that sustain and echo with the metric pattern of the piece in addition to the consistent and coherent hushing effect of the poem mediated through them especially in ways exemplified by the last two words “du” and “auch.” Of the amount of twenty-four words that make up the poem, the six function words, approximately 33 percent, literally emerge as the crucial relay points where rhythmic pause and stress occur right at the moment in making the little piece a lyric marvel for the unusual visual and audial pleasure aesthetically. The poem thus enables us to hear and see simultaneously how silence may ultimately overtake the whole universe. No doubt, in this poem we can hear and see as much silence and peace as in Basho’s frog poem by simply staying attuned to the hushing effect of sound as flowing with the momentary slight sound of water. For further detailed references, see Chen’s Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody, 108–109. 19. This intricate relationship as so inherent in both Buber’s modes and Levinas’ mode could be further made sense of in terms of the working relationship between the Buddhist monk and the Daoist priest in their joint venture in the making of a new world for the main protagonist Baoyu in The Dream of Red Chamber. In the first chapter of the Chinese classic, the Buddhist monk and the Daoist priest, as we might have already noticed, often show up hand in hand or shoulder by shoulder apparently as close allies in an all-out campaign against the authority of Confucian value system. One apparently cannot be without the other. The interesting pair, in many ways, resembles another, God and Satan, in Book of Job, especially in terms of what they intend to do—betting on Job’s un/predicable human behavior. But upon a closer look, questions arise as to which one of them, the Buddhist monk or Daoist

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priest, is actually calling the shots? Is it also accidental that sometimes one appears constantly with a certain particular type of mission, while the other disappears recurrently for another special kind of tasks elsewhere, as if between them there is a clear division of labor or responsibility? While attacking Confucianism, they, however, also act in ways as if they were simultaneously reconfirming, substantiating, or merging into the very system they seek to subvert—quite inadvertently? But what appears particularly significant regarding the relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in Hongloumeng is, nonetheless, vividly reflected, first and foremost, in the story of “genesis” unrolled in the first chapter, where how the universe comes to its present shape is narrated from a synthetic source of both Buddhism and Daoism. At the first glance, the account of how the world is created is undoubtedly of native origin. But upon a closer look, it becomes clear that Buddhist elements, such as reincarnation and karmic law, play a decisive role in reconstructing the overall narrative. While Daoism provides the novel concrete narrative substance, the Buddhist cosmic view cements it with a constructive framework. As further reflected in the following passages, when Buddhist monks and Daoist priest come together, the Buddhist monk is obviously the one in charge. 20. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, x. 21. Eilis, English Eliot, 52. Thanks to the postmodern thinkers, such as Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, this issue of humanity’s limited control over the infinite autonomous power or potential of language and linguistic/poetic forms has become increasingly clear. Humanity in control of language could also thus often means humanity in the control of language. 22. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 169. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 153. 25. What David Hume argues in Enquiry of concerning of Human Understanding to emphasize the importance of observation and experience may still sound like a quite interesting coincidence here. “Every effect is a distinct event from its cause. It could not, therefore, be discovered in the cause, and the first invention or conception of it, a priori, must be entirely arbitrary. And even after it is suggested, the conjunction of it with the cause must appear equally arbitrary; since there are always many other effects, which, to reason, must seem fully as consistent and natural. In vain, therefore, should we pretend to determine any single event, or infer any cause or effect, without the assistance of observation and experiences?” (75). 26. Montaigne, The Essays, 517. 27. Miller, T. S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land, 159. 28. Jay Parini, “Poem with Allusion,” in New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 36. 29. Ibid. 30. Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Sandford University Press, 199), 97. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid.

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34. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 217, 85e. 35. Emily Dickinson, “‘Hope’ is the Thing with Feathers,” in The Complete Poems, 314 (Johnson). 36. Edgar Allan Poe, “A Dream within Dream,” in Poems and Essays (London: Everyman’s Library, 1969). 37. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.01. 38. Ibid., 4. 39. Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 56. 40. https://www​.ebay​.com​/itm​/OLD​-ART​-PRINT​-PAINTED​-CROSS​-SAINT​ -FRANCIS​-LEGEND-​/300370785160. 41. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, x. 42. Wittgenstein discusses the issue in Philosophical Investigations, whereas Dostoevsky looks into it in The Notes from Underground with reference to the case of toothache. 43. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 202, 81e. 44. Ibid., 243, 89e. 45. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.5.1. 46. Ibid., 6.51.1. 47. Ibid., 7. 48. This impression of “a noisily visual scene of utmost shocking chaos” could also be felt in the piece “Problem with Curiosity” by Larry Thomas. http://www​ .larrythomasart​.com​/content​/the​-problem​-with​-curio​/lightbox/. This is the piece that occurred to me at the first sight suggests not only the influence of Kentucky but also the state of being of a person who suffers heart problem, or heart pain. The scene of the painting did remind of me the famous “patient etherized upon a table” at the moment “when the evening is spread out against the sky.” The surmised influence from Kentucky and the issue of heart problem were actually both confirmed by the artist himself in person in a gallery talk in the Nerman Museum over the piece. The image is conceived during and after the artist’s major heart surgery that saved his life. The painting also evoked one of such responses from Berrick Lee, a former student of mine, as below. Larry Thomas created “The Problem with Curiosity” in response to a major life altering surgery in his own life. In this multi-medium artwork he expresses his sentiments that throughout history many avenues of science have been explored in the pursuit of curiosity. These pursuits have led to both positive breakthroughs like the ones that saved his life but also to many other problems and questions. This endless circle is the problem with curiosity. Thomas also claimed to appreciate others input into his own piece and what they saw or felt as they looked at it. I felt some differences when I first saw this piece. My first impression of this art was that it was very unbalanced. Everything seemed to be conflicting with other objects and had no real observable pattern. Even the objects in the artwork didn’t appear very clear. As I watched the painting I found myself looking desperately to find some form of order within. I found it in the “eye of the storm” in the center of the chaos. That seems to be the focus of the piece. It is the only order inside all the activities of life Thomas put in to make up the storm. It represents to me the struggle to find order and

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peace inside our chaotic lives. There is one more place one could find peace inside this masterpiece. That is outside the storm. The negative spaces in the artwork are a perfect complement to the action inside the storm of life. A few calming objects like the feathers are drifting inside this space and reinforce that idea. This artwork speaks to me through the negative spaces in both the eye of the storm and outside of the activities. In our daily lives we try so hard to find order and peace in the midst of disorder. We can find small bits within our lives if we are lucky but true peace cannot be attained while we are still focusing on and fighting our regular lives. Only when step back and see that our perspective is what makes things disordered and that things are actually balanced on the grand scheme can we really find peace within our lives. For me, this piece reconciles the anxiety, fear, and disorder of our lives with the calm and peace that we all search for but never seem to find. 49. This scenario of the worded world could probably be better appreciated along with Edgar Degas’ “Horses in a Meadow” (1871). In the painting, the lonely two horses in the meadow appear so eye-catching in the company of the high chimneys not far away in the process of letting out the black smokes into the blue sky above the green meadow. 50. Henry Rosemont, Rationality and Religious Experience: The Continuing Relevance of the World’s Spiritual Traditions, commentary by Huston Smith (Chicago: Open Court, 2001), 10. Wright’s poem reveals how much we miss in life even if with all the modern facilities, such as highways, which are, as Rosemont puts it, not “humanly interactive, efficient, aesthetically pleasing, energy-saving and earth saving” but “far more inefficient and ecologically unsound than trains” (Ibid., 51–52). 51. Indeed, in Lawrence Buell’s words, “Nature has been doubly otherized in modern thought. The natural environment as empirical reality has been made to subserve human interests, and one of these interests has been to make it serve as a symbolic reinforcement made of the subservience of disempowered groups: nonwhites, women, and children,” 1995, 21. 52. Emerson, “Nature,” 6. 53. Indeed, as a “simple” poem, no matter how widely it is read in high schools as at colleges, this deceptively “simple” poem is thus quite profoundly “existentialistic” by nature regarding how a simple self-conscious decision or choice could truly precede existentialistically the very “essence” of humanity. Also, as soon to be discussed in chapter 2 with the reading of “still” in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets and elsewhere, the reading of the poem by Frost could also vary significantly in terms of how or whether the phrase “stop by” is to be read, as usual, as the phrasal verb indicating merely “temporary visit.” Even a “temporary visit,” however, could suggest choice and thus the primary status of the “subject” who makes the choice, whereas a simple “stop” as an intransitive verb with “by woods” merely as an adverbial phrase meaning a stop at somewhere would indicate another possibility reading of the poem differently from the usual one. These are all the relevant cases regarding the subtle but vital influences, ever-present, from the “invisible” agency of function words. For detail especially of a prosodic analysis of this poem by Frost with a focus on “stop by,” see Chen, Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody, 50, and the related chapters.

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54. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.002. 55. For Wittgenstein, when “individual words of this language are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations,” there would never be a common language such as ours because “another person cannot understand the language” (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 243, 89e), whereas, for exactly the same reason, in other words, no utmost immediate private sensation would ever be possibly communicated through this language designed primarily for its common usage, “which must be common to both world and thought” as “the a priori order of the world” (Ibid., 97, 44e). 56. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.111. 57. Ibid., 40031. 58. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 95. 59. Ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Montaigne, The Essays, 264. 62. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, 147. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid. 65. Chaucer, “Miller’s Tale,” 175. Also, as with this ordinary Japanese sentence あなたのことが好きです (I love you), for instance, the function words の no and が ga are usually the words where one pauses and stresses. The same is true with the following sentences from the concluding passage of the autobiographical account by Donald Keene, now Kiin Donarudo (鬼怒鳴門 キーン・ドナルド), alter his naturalization as a Japanese citizen on March 8, 2012, at the age of 89 in the wake of 2012 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The function words in this account of the famous Japanologist’s first experience in learning Japanese, such as “は,” “を,” and “かった,” were literally where a prolonged pause, stressed or unstressed, occurred. This is the exactly case that occurred when I asked Kazuyo Rumbach Sensei, my Japanese language teacher, and native speaker of Japanese, to read these three sentences for me three times each at a different but normal pace. Therefore, in the actual rhetorical situations, a function word often marks where a pause occurs with a rhythmic pattern set accordingly. とにかく、日本語は中国語より何倍も難しかった. それでも私は 、その難解さ自体に興味を感じ、日本語を克服しようと一所懸命勉強 した . . . 最後まで頑張ったのは私だけだったのである. 「日本を理解 するまで」 （新潮社）(Anyway, Japanese is harder than Chinese, but as to how difficult it really was only I myself knew it. I studied so hard in order to master the language eventually. . . . In the end, I was the only one left still working hard on Japanese. “Understanding Japanese at last” (New Wave Press) and my own translation. So are the case with function words la and de, which, as Zhu Guangqian 朱光潛 (1897– 1986) points out, suggest pauses in the line from Alfred de Vigny’s (1797–1863) “La maison du berger,” “J’aime/la majesté/de la souffrance/humaine” (I love the majesty of human suffering) (Ibid., 163). 66. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960), 779. 67. Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, 83.

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68. Such nominalization especially of function words so characteristic of Henry James’ later fiction should also provide a certain illuminating light on the poem as well. With things so related through the indispensable mediation of these function words as “links” or “hinges,” do not these otherwise barely noticeable “links” or “hinges” thus also acquire a certain irreplaceable relations-defining and thingsmaking power as much vividly reflected here in Dickinson’s text as in James’? These “hinges,” such as its, thats, whiches, and so on, which are, indeed, as Seymour Chatman would also emphasize here, “not merely being referred to; they are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, as substantial as any character” with a consequence as “almost ‘a sort of personification’” (Chatman, Later Style of Henry James, 56). 69. Miller, A Poet’s Grammar, 83. 70. Foucault, The Order of Things, 235. 71. Ibid., 7. 72. As also previously mentioned, this particular sense of absurdity and incommunicability that so mysteriously sustains the tenacious message of hope through silence and nonsenses becomes further “self-evident” to me after a one-hour minilecture delivered at my college on Waiting for Godot by my colleague Dr. Andrea Broomfield, professor of English and chair of English Department, and author of Food and Cooking in Victorian England : A History (2007) and Kansas City: A Food Biography (2016). The mini-lecture became further fruitfully mind-refreshing followed by the chats through email among my other colleague, Janette Jasperson, the coordinator of international education, Andrea and myself. From myself to Andrea, here is the part of chats, “Great talk, indeed! Absurdity of hope (in the form of ‘waiting’) is undoubtedly so tenaciously there inherent in humanity itself if humanity is now residing on the ‘wasteland’ from both within and without. . . . Thanks.” From Janette to Andrea and myself, here is her part, “I liked the quote in which the character wonders whether he would be better off giving up on the hope that he is clinging to, and he concludes ‘why give up now?’ To give up on hope (in a general sense at least) is to give up on life. So hope isn’t ‘absurd’ in the sense of ‘pointless,’ because it’s essential to life itself. I hadn’t realized that the play was initially well-received by the ‘marginalized,’ but it makes a lot of sense why they are the ones who would grasp its message./I was taken with the idea that the work of constructing meaning is as much incumbent on the audience as it is on the author or playwright. I think this is a concept that students really need to understand./And the connection that you drew, Andrea, between the play and the current pandemic . . . that was genius! I’ll never think of this play in the same way again.” From myself to Janette, here is, again, my response, “Yes, this is a good quote. Roland Barthes declared the death of the author as much as Nietzsche declared the death of God; if so, we’re all orphans, all on our own, as audience as much as humans.” Then here comes Andrea’s to Jannette and me: “I’m so glad you were able to attend. I was out of my comfort zone, surely. I appreciate your analyses, both of you!” Yes, indeed, quite ironically, the real ideas often blossom when one is actually out of one’s comfort zone. The wonderful minilecture was delivered on Wednesday, April 7, 2021, as a part of the Great Books Mini-Lecture Series, organized for each semester by Maureen Fitzpatrick, professor

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of English, as “set of short talks designed to introduce audience to watershed texts that have changed readers’ views of the world.” 73. See Zhao Lun, A Translation from Chinese, introduction and notes Fancheng Xu (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Publishing House, 1985), Chao Lun, The Treaties of Seng-chao, 265, 253. in addition to Feng (Fung, Yu-Lan). History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bode, vol. II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953). 74. The question itself is also quite ambiguous if not contradictory because it can be simultaneously understood also in two completely conflicting but complementary ways. First, it could be understood, for instance, as purely rhetorical question that means “it is impossible to end”; it could then also be interpreted literally as an anxious or desperate request for serious information regarding whether or how it would eventually end. As a matter of fact, this situation is actually not hard to imagine for anyone who teaches at a university or college. A student who has missed many classes finally shows up one day with such a usual or routine question, “Did I miss anything?” How irritating the question could possibly be! Speechless, we however might have thus murmured to ourselves afterward “Are we not doing anything in class for all these days when you’re are not around?” “You don’t know that you’ve missed one-third of the Renaissance period that we must cover for the semester, do you?” But to be fair with the student, as we may later realize, is there really any other way for the student to make the question? Of course, the question that the student has asked could probably be an innocent or involuntary “rhetorical question,” which means the student is so concerned that he or she wants to be confirmed that he or she eventually has not missed too much or anything too important to be utterly beyond recovery. He or she may also be truly anxious to know what and how much he or she has really missed whether important or not. The question is also probably asked only as a causal greeting, which means “I am back now and sorry for the absence.” There are simply far too many possibilities in terms of this one simple question especially with regard to the body language, facial expressions, the tone that is used, and the peculiar circumstances under which the question is asked; it could also be a live case as with Robert Browning’s “dramatic monologue” in terms of whether there is anyone else or anyone special around when the student asked the question. Regardless, one thing is clear that the student, very much like Huizi, who asks Zhuangzi “How do you know?” upon Zhuangzi’s comment “How happy are the fished swimming in the river!” in the famous riverside dialogue of the eponymous book (Ch. 17). With the question Huizi apparently means rhetorically that it is utterly impossible for Zhuangzi to know the happiness of fishes since he is not one of them, but he is teased by Zhuangzi who knows how to make the question problematic; Zhuangzi takes advantage of the way the question is formulated as required by the rules that govern our tongue for its general usage as a common language regardless of the potentially infinite nuances variable with each specific scenario. The student would certainly appear hopelessly and helplessly vulnerable as Huizi when there is apparently no other way but this only way for him or her to make the question. So is the issue concerning how to read Langston Hughes’ “Harlem,” in which all the regular “rhetorical questions” that make up the whole poem, that is, “What happens to a dream deferred?/ Does it dry up . . .?/Or does it explode?” (Literature, 1991, 767). These “rhetorical

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questions” could however simultaneously sound more urgent as real questions than mere rhetorical ones as to what would really happen when a dream is deferred. With a visually metaphorized “apocalyptic tone” through all the similes, does not the poem ask the urgent real questions, such as “Are these all the possible ways that our world would end or are there any even further terrible way ahead?” Does not the poem thus also suggest all the possible scenarios of how our world could end in ways as such a common destruction if “the justice delayed is [indeed] a justice denied” the ways Martin Luther King, Jr. declared in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”? Does not “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun” also convey the same urgent message? The same issue sticks even if “Harlem” could also be read in some other ways, as many of my students initially did, such as emphasizing the necessity of never giving up in trying or suffering the terrible consequences. 75. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5.1. 76. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 78. Thanks to the fascinating presentation by Dr. Ann Pirruccello of The University of San Diego on the issues of “thinking in images” in philosophy at one of the ASDP national conferences many years ago, I was quickly led afterward to the fascinating book by Michèle Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, the book refreshed my minds with the arguments that often reminded me of Giovanni Battista Vico. 79. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.01. 80. Ibid., 4. 81. Ibid., 4.015. 82. The term is borrowed from Zhang Longxi’s book title and his argument of the book Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Sandford University Press, 1999), which suggests not only the necessity but also the possibility for reconciliation of the irreconcilable or the occasion of “opposition [that] unites” as in Heraclitus of Ephesus’ words. This reconciliation would then make a gradual but natural transition From Comparison to World Literature as Zhang also thus expresses in his following eponymous book (SUNY Press, 2016). 83. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 2. 84. Ibid. 85. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Chapter 13 on the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power” of Biographia Literaria,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 5th ed., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1986), 396. 86. Le Dœuff, The Philosophical Imaginary, 2. 87. Coleridge, “Chapter 13 on the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,” 396. 88. Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, 113. 89. Ibid. 90. Ackroyd, T. S. Eliot, 147.

Chapter 2

The Revelation of the Performative Power and Verbal Functionalism of Language

Certainly, the beginning section of the first part of The Waste Land seems to suggest a cruel but still smooth and potentially endless vicissitude of life from one incident to another as from one different setting to another even across the regular spatiotemporal boundary or sequence, such as from past to present or the other way around. If so, this beginning stanza suggests instead as much a perfect “still motion” of life in ways so reminiscent of Eliot’s special Chinese jar, which, as it is so described in Four Quartets, “still / Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ I, v). In the beginning, a stanza of 210 words that starts with a woman in a chair, the exemplary elaborate picture of such a still motion seems to transcend or simply make all these usual distinctions utterly irrelevant, such as the ones of motion and stillness, past and present, hearing and seeing, real and imaginary. Even as such a perfect picture of “still motion,” this image of the immaculately depicted life while appearing so motionless in motion still simultaneously embraces the past as much as the present; it embraces, in other words, everything of life in ways as if so picturesquely frozen up together in time; everything thus appears so intimately preserved side by side, fresh, in ice, for a timely integrated exhibition in a museum as in the picture; however, each actual aspect of life could remain in fact as so nonchalantly intact as spatiotemporally far apart. Everything in the picture could indeed even remain as fresh in such a way as the heart-saddening “inviolable voice” still echoing the nightingale’s forever-lingering cries in the present as in the past from within as from without. With everything so depicted the way it is, the forever-lingering sad voices in the picture would often strike so simultaneously real and surreal; it could indeed still be heard clearly in the utmost remote past as in the immediate present or in ways as so much reminiscent of the same moon that remains as much crystal clear and motionlessly in motion high up there in the sky in the past as in the present. 155

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In fact, with everything so immaculately depicted here, inevitably, there also arise these epistemologically significant issues as to whether everything so observed remains a scene of past or present, whether it is a picture on the wall or a scene that “window gave upon,” or whether it is real, painted, or purely imagined. With the scene of the echoes of the nightingale’s “inviolable voice” that still “Filled all the desert” appearing so synaesthetically visualized or visualizable with the picture, is it also possible for readers as beauty-intoxicated “mon frère” not likely to come out with the same kind of ontological concerns as well, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? . . . Do I wake or sleep?” Clearly, in the picture, the suggested charm with the “sylvan scene” of beauty in “still motion,” as mentioned in the preface and further discussed in this chapter, not only confirms but also disputes the classical theories as the one argued by Lessing in Laocoon, particularly in terms of the firmly perceived distinctions between “performing art,” such as poetry, and the “visual art,” such as sculpture and painting. What would be the possible cause of the phenomenon? The scenario could possibly result as much from Eliot’s selfconsciously upheld modernist aesthetic as from the simple use of an utmost commonplace but quite exceptionally “ambiguous” word, such as “still,” be it as intended or involuntary, because the word “still” could be so literally categorized, a priori, as “content word” or “function word.” In the live context, it however could be both at once, and the word “still” therefore must be understood live the way it really is in terms of the actual context however inevitably it would thus instantly cause everything related with the word “still” in the text to be interpreted, as imaginable, so simultaneously along with and against any presumable authorial intention or definitive dictionary categorization. As is also exemplified in the same passage, as previously referred to in the preface, the use of function words, such as “the,” along with the occasional but decisive use of “and,” further occasions the performative power of language through the surreptitious and even serendipitous influence of verbal transformation in ways that add so much to the impact of “still motion.” As to why the impact of “still motion” remains so characteristic of The Waste Land, the reason could be understood at least in terms of its beginning narrative mode and mood. In the live context of The Waste Land, each “the”-pivoted and “and”-propelled itemized element often appears, for instance, so instrumental in evoking the “intermediary sensation” of the “still motion” of life so reminiscent of a vivid scene of “montage” through the simple magic of “persistence of vision” along with the precisely punctuated rhythmic cadence that makes the text further alive through a subtly suggested or performed, as if infinitely forward-moving, tendency. The performative power of language that appears so further elevated with the case of “still motion” results, a posteriori, simultaneously in and from the disruption

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or deconstruction of our usual or deeply entrenched notion; this notion distinguishes “meaningful” content words from “meaningless” function words, classical literature from popular literature, “meaning” from “nonsense” with the former forever prioritizing over the latter in the set hierarchy of values. Therefore, this disruption or deconstruction of the entrenched notion, however momentarily, reveals or releases so timely the performative power of language that arrives at or culminates in the special kind of perfect performative “functionalism” that turns “meaningless” meaningful and nonsensical sensemaking in the second part of The Waste Land as in the first and the rest. This special type of functionalism, in other words, elevates the power of performative language that not only makes but also helps us make sense of The Waste Land afresh. This functionalism would also thus enable us to evaluate timely the actual impact of words and the worded world they create. Only when we truly understand the functionalism could we then understand what exactly occurs in the text, a posteriori, ad infinitum, that is, at once in accordance with and in spite of any preset lexical meaning and figure of speech or simultaneously along with and against whatever presumed authorial intention. THE PERFORMATIVE FUNCTION OF FUNCTION WORDS This special verbal functionalism that elevates the performative power of language could be, first and foremost, understood in terms of the same beginning stanza. With a total of 239 words, the definite article “the” appears twenty-five times and “and” six times with three times at the head positions. However, in contrast with the beginning stanza of the first part, in which the conjunction “and” has the pivotal role to play, here in this first stanza, the pivotal role is shifted to the definite article “the.” The role-shifting certainly suggests, as usual, the subtle but vital difference. The “and” used in that context apparently not only pieces things together but also moves them around or forward in such a way as to suggest an infinite motion onward. This infinite onward motion or tendency would often appear so much like, as in Wittgenstein’s words, “a visible section of rails invisibly laid to infinity” and “infinitely long rails [that] correspond to the unlimited application of a rule.”1 The power of words, as Wittgenstein would also thus argue, does not lie merely in their actual application but in their suggested potential or tendency of infinite applicability; it lies, in other words, within the vital pattern of tendency awakened or revealed through each specific application, especially in terms of the rule-regulated pattern’s suggested infinite or incessant applicability that sustains the specific ways of each word used. This scenario

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may thus explain why the first stanza of the first part often suggests a sense of motion particularly in comparison and contrast with the first stanza of the second part. Even if the use of “the” could also epistemologically suggest motion from time to time when it is used in the significant quantity as in Four Quartets, especially the first stanza of “The Dry Salvages” and the first stanza of the third part of “East Coker,” the definite article used here in this context appears mainly to pivot and confirm ontologically the ways things are; it could certainly also suggest subtle motion or “still motion” with the occasional but vital use of “and” along the way. With “the” used for the leading role and “and” for the subordinate role in this way, whether consciously meant or otherwise, the “still motion” certainly becomes further motionless in motion as if to be so set in a timely timeless mode with everything related with it. Judging by the way that both “the” and “and” are used in the context of The Waste Land as much as in Four Quartets, here “the” is indeed often used mainly for the purpose to confirm the discrete value of things as much as of “still life” in terms of where they are pivoted by means of itemization. While “and” is used to emphasize coherence or relationship from one thing to another in such a way that suggests motion and tendency, “the” is used in contrast as if largely to stress the discrete value of things the ways as they are so juxtaposed in the group. In this regard, the relatively modest use of “the” and “and” in the context of The Waste Land could certainly be understood as a modest preparation or experiment for the rather extensive and intensive use of them both later in Four Quartets. Indeed, as the cases with “Burnt Norton” and “The Dry Salvages,” the repetitive use of “the” in “East Coker,” for instance, is certainly an adequate example especially in terms of the beginning eleven lines. Of these 11 lines of 103 words, there are at least 15 items listed with the definite article, such as “the dark . . . The vacant interstellar spaces . . . the vacant . . . the vacant . . . The captains . . . The generous patrons of art . . . the statesmen . . . the rulers . . . the dark . . . the Sun . . . the Almanach de Gotha . . . the Stock Exchange Gazette . . . the Directory of Directors . . . the sense . . . the motive of action . . . the silent funeral” (FQ II, iii). Clearly, in the context of Four Quartets, especially in “East Coker,” the way that the definite article is so used does help quite effectively in defining or itemizing things or people, even if it may also help bring the life-suggesting rhythm or motion to the otherwise seemingly motionless world of land when it is used in such extensive quantity in contrast with its relatively modest or restrained use in the context of The Waste Land. This way of using “the” and “and” particularly in the pattern as so indicated would be very significant in The Waste Land when taken into account whether the use of the definite article “the” and conjunction “and” is out of sheer grammatical necessity or largely as a flexible rhetorical choice contingent upon the nuanced contextual consideration,

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as the pattern here might so indicate. “The Chair . . . / . . . on the marble, . . . the glass / . . . / . . . / . . . / . . . the flames . . . / . . . upon the table . . . / The glitter . . . / . . . ; / . . . and . . . / . . . / . . . / And . . . the sense . . . the air /. . . the window . . . / . . . the prolonged . . . / . . . the laquearia, / . . . the pattern . . . the coffered ceiling./. . . / . . . and . . . the coloured stone, / . . . /Above the antique mantel . . . / . . . the sylvan scene / The change . . . the barbarous king / . . . the nightingale / . . . all the desert . . . / And still . . . and still the world pursues, / . . . / And . . . / . . . the walls . . . / . . . / . . . the stair. / . . . the firelight, . . . the brush . . . / . . . / . . . savagely still.” Besides, the actual or potential power of function words, as will be discussed further in chapter 3, could be made sense of not only in terms of how it is actually in use but also in terms of how it is actually not in use where it could be used. In addition to those marked, where “the” could be used but not used, such as “From [the] satin cases poured in rich profusion” or “ And [the] other withered stumps of time / Were told upon the walls,” the intended flexible impact of rhythm could be the reason. So could be the way that “and” is so sparsely used particularly in the pattern as indicated above. The impact intended for “still motion” could also likely be the reason; the myriad subtle nuances even of “still motion” motion could certainly be in various ways suggested with “the” so used or not used in addition to how, how many, where, when, and with which other words it is used or not used. Indeed, as it is so indicated, with the definite article “the” appears 25 times and “and” 6 times with 3 times at the head positions in a passage of 239 words, the text of the beginning stanza does, “still,” appear to “move perpetually in its stillness” in ways as the Chinese jar does in Four Quartets with elegance and dignity in the gracefully controlled pace. Whether one likes it or not, the impact caused by such use of “function words” is apparently quite meaningful; it adds much to the performative function of language that brings life to the “still life” of verbal picture; it suggests a special mode of “still motion” that reconciles within it everything otherwise utterly irreconcilable across the limit or boundary of time and space, such as past and present, motion and stillness, the real and the imaginary. The still motion so suggested in the perfect still-life picture undoubtedly results from verbal transformation. The itemizing power of the definite article “the” used in the context in this way speaks for the hidden power of verbal transformation in the form of nominalization, which is indeed often “not merely being referred to [. . . but] are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, as substantial as any character” with a consequence as “almost ‘a sort of personification.’”2 Such a way of nominalization could undoubtedly so often even suggest the performative power of reification through itemization, which, however, reifies, first and foremost, the peculiar rhythm of motionless motion in contrast with the motion suggested through conjunction “and,” which indicates more of a

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regular motion or sequence of things that move from one place to another. As indicated by this mesmerizing impact of motionless motion through itemizing power of nominalized “the,” in addition to the motion suggesting the power of “and,” the performative function of language inherent in function words does appear so effective in making the special still-life picture. No doubt, such a special picture could indeed often cause the epistemological confusion or simply such ontologically sense-bewitching and soul-bewildering moment of self-loss, which occurs, as previously mentioned, to Zhuangzi as much as to Edgar Allan Poe and John Keats. Once again, at the end of the second chapter of the eponymous book, “On the Equality of Things,” Zhuangzi, for instance, appears so confused one day after a dream not knowing whether he has dreamed of a butterfly or he has simply been the butterfly that appears in the dream. Poe also happens to be so bewildered once as to wonder whether life is after all “a dream within a dream,” whereas Keats does not even know whether he is “wake or sleep?” Or whether everything he experiences is “a vision, or a waking dream?” What appears further at stake with the “I” in The Waste Land at this moment, however, is obviously no longer an issue of whether there is a possible distinction of life and dream but whether it is after all even possible by any means and with any ontological and epistemological certainty to tell them apart as regards what is a dream and what is reality. THE PERFORMATIVE POWER OF “STILL” However, regardless of how specifically impacted with the use of such function words as “the” and “and,” the “still motion” of this verbal transformation-based and functionalism-facilitated scenario of the beginning stanza would still not be sufficiently made sense of if it is not further explained in terms of the particular verbal impact of one single word in the context, that is, the word “still” as in the lines, that is, “The change of Philomel . . . / So rudely forced . . . / And still she cried, and still the world pursues . . . her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” (italics added). In The Waste Land, “still” is used altogether four times with three times all concentrated in the beginning stanza of the second part as above, with one left for the third part “she is bored and tired, / Endeavours to engage her in caresses / Which still are unreproved” (italics added). This concentrated use of “still” gives the stanza a simultaneously realistic and surrealistic touch of everything so depicted therein together with a long-lasting impression as if everything were of such a world that simultaneously belongs to the past and the present in spite of whatever actual spatiotemporal barriers across the abyss of time and space both inside and outside us. This rather concentrated use of “still” seems to put as much emphasis on the steady visual

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quality of things described in The Waste Land as in a way compatible with its use in Four Quartets and Ash Wednesday, both of which, however, as to be immediately discussed in the next section, apparently emphasize more of the fluidity of musical quality. In this regard, “still” therefore could still suggest peculiar aspects or details that might be otherwise easily missed in the text, regardless of how thoroughly analyzed, if adequate attention is not timely paid, a posteriori, to the ambivalent meaning of “still,” which always so simultaneously enlivens the text that enlivens it. Indeed, as a special case particularly with regard to whether, how, or how much “still” is used in Eliot’s poetic works, in The Waste Land and The Four Quartets as in others, the meaning of this line as quoted above could significantly vary, however subtly as it may also appear, especially in terms of whether, how, or how much the word “still” is actually taken into consideration. Should it, for instance, be taken as an adverb or adjective because either would be a perfect possibility in the same verbal context. When “still” is taken as an adverb, it could mean that the object referred to remains in a state of motion at, up to, or beyond the moment; it may also thus indicate a state of “business as usual,” as expected, or as contrary to one’s expectation, along with a possibly accompanying mood of surprise, serendipity, frustration, being at ease, or whatever else that goes with the interpretation in the context. However, when “still” is read as an adjective, it could then also indicate a fact regarding how the object referred to moves noiselessly or remains in a motionless condition, which could also suggest certain corresponding moods or sentiments that accompany the observed fact as inferable, such as surprise or disbelief. Would not “still” here probably also suggest meanings, that is, “continually,” “increasingly,” or “always,” as it used to mean in its archaic sense? Indeed, as much the case as with the pivotal line in Four Quartets, that is, “Only the form, the pattern / Can words or music reach / The stillness, as a Chinese jar still / Moves perpetually in its stillness,” the meaning of this line “The change of Philomel . . . / So rudely forced . . . / And still she cried, and still the world pursues . . . her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words, then would be savagely still” also depends on whether or how “still” is taken as adjective and adverb and in which order. One possibility is with the first “still” taken as “adjective” meaning “quiet,” “noiseless,” or “motionless,” and the next as “adverb” meaning “up still now.” If so, “crying in silence” could be as much a realistic scene as much imaginable as with Keats’s Grecian urn or his nightingale. The same scene, however, could also instantly strike so surrealistic in ways utterly unimaginable unless with the inspirations from the modernist or postmodernist works, such as Salvador Dali’s. Philomel’s “inviolable voice” would therefore not only have “filled all the desert” but also appear so timely timeless in its motionless motion as if so frozen up fresh into the

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forever-lingering echoes resonating from the utmost remote past to this immediately present moment and even further beyond into future. The scenario could also appear so palpably visual with its image as the “inviolable voice” appearing as if so fully sculpted to have become perpetual in stillness as in motion; the scenario, in other words, would become so realistically and surrealistically, at the same time, bringing vividly to life the pattern of the overall spatiotemporal being from both within and without. The scenario could even be so synaesthetically at once visual and audible in ways as much as the line of William Blake’s poem “London,” that is, “the hapless Soldiers sigh / [that] Runs in blood down Palace walls.” As “the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls,” so could Philomel’s forever-lingering voices of sadness be still heard crying in silence as it “still the world pursues” in ways so motionlessly in motion and timely timeless; as in the past it still echoes in all the desert worldwide across every conceivable spatiotemporal boundary but in way so much “like other withered stumps of time / . . . told upon the walls.” However, what consequently becomes a further intriguing issue as regards the picture is whether the woman sitting in the chair with “her hair / Spread out in fiery points” is actually a part of the picture that decorates the room. Would she not possibly be a lost soul of the past but now emerges so vividly reincarnated in the minds of the viewers’ “as mon semblable,—mon frère” of the scene depicted? Would she not possibly be a vivid but real illusion, an actual person known to the speaker in the past, or an imagined “ghost,” as in Hamlet, whom the persona talks in hallucination? All, therefore, appear so hard to tell, let alone to tell them apart. Indeed, when everything becomes so mixed up or “glowed into words” across and beyond any reasonable or rational spatiotemporal boundary for rational cognition, there would be nothing left and all “then would be savagely still.” Could it not possibly be another such scenario as real and surreal as of The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde? With the “still motion” of the still-life scenario understood in this way along with the ambiguous meanings of “still” seriously taken into consideration, a posteriori, the woman in the chair could undoubtedly be thus as ambiguously real and surreal; she could be, in other words, as much ambiguously real and surreal as Philomel’s “inviolable voice” that has the power to have still been echoing in “the desert” in the past as in the present from within as from without as much as to appear so timely timeless in motionless motion. Sitting in the chair the way she is, the woman still strikes so timely timeless in her motionless motion as if so thoroughly frozen up in her own spatiotemporal being. She, at the same time, also appears so incessantly resonating in expressive silence as the everlasting echoes from the utmost remote past to the immediate present and beyond. Often, she would also turn as fluidly in motion as the sculpted rings or ripples of echoes up in the

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air. However, whether the persona is talking to the real person in the room, or the person in the picture, or simply to himself in ways as the invoked or reified other upon the impact of being so involved with the picture, it really becomes the issue, regardless of how hard we may try to figure it out. Even so, this synesthetically at once real and surreal scenario definitely appears as much an effective part as Philomel’s heart-wrenching sounds of cries; the scenario literally makes this first stanza of the second part one of the most aesthetically intriguing and “inviolable” phenomena of The Waste Land with all its so instantly visual and audible impacts, such as the sound of ‘“jug jug’ to the dirty ear.” The sound, however, may also likely appeal to a “transparent eyeball” that sees and seizes, at the same time, Philomel’s “inviolable voice” as the “deceiving elf,” which “was not born for death, [as] immortal Bird!” or as “plaintive anthem fades/ Past the near meadows, over the still stream,/ Up the hill-side. Now and then, ‘tis buried deep.” Could it not then be possibly occurring in such an instantly imaginable way as if even every sound of “the” that itemizes each ripple of echoes would also be so immediately turned into the “withered stumps of time” that leave unremovable marks or stains upon the walls indeed inasmuch the same way as “the hapless Soldiers sigh / [that] Runs in blood down Palace walls”? THE FURTHER TELLTALE SIGNS OF “STILL” The impact of “still” used in the context of The Waste Land should be further explored in terms of relationship with Eliot’s all other major poetic works. The issue of where, when, how, or how frequently “still” appears in the text or is totally absent from it could even also become a significant clue for us to have an additional look further into the text for a meaningful spot we would have otherwise possibly missed. “Still” appears, for instance, a total of twenty-two times in Four Quartets with twelve times in “Burnt Norton” including three times in the form of stillness, with six times in “East Coker” including one time in the form of “stillness,” and four times in “Little Gidding,” but not even once in any form in “The Dry Salvages.” The frequency of appearance and distribution of “still” seem to make sense in terms of the narrative structure of Four Quartets especially with regard to the specific theme to be conveyed through each part. “Burnt Norton,” as the first part, appears so austere, steady, and still, as if with all emotion so well recollected in tranquility, that is, in ways so sufficiently self-restrained and self-sustained to stand or pivot so impeccably as “the still point of the turning world” (FQ I, iv) not only of the Burnt Norton the way as it is thus so imagined both spiritually and historically as the very locale of the utmost unforgettable remote past but also so structurally and thematically of Four

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Quartets with the rest parts of the poem as its rotating satellites. Therefore, with emotion appearing so suddenly overflowing in “East Coker,” it would certainly no longer be still held as much steady and still as up to the exact same high standard or boundary required of the classical aesthetic that values the virtue of utmost austerity and self-restraint in ways as “Burnt Norton” so embodies. Even so, as it is so unmistakably revealed as regards the six occasions when “still” is used, there is still such an awe-strikingly incessant but impossible attempt to hold everything back as still and steady in “East Coker” as in “Burnt Norton.” However, with an oceanic view taking over the narrative of “The Dry Salvages,” any attempt to hold anything as steady and still from within as from without against the turbulent tides of overflowing emotion as against the overwhelming oceanic power would therefore possibly succeed only in futility. This should be the reason enough as to why the word “still” does not appear even once in “The Dry Salvages.” However, for a significant total of four times, “still” does eventually resurface but still not until in “Little Gidding” when the overflowing emotion appears finally coming steadily in terms with reality as the persona recognizes how everything so otherwise as utterly irreconcilable as “the fire and the rose” are eventually one and the same. Indeed, as “still” so suggestively used, the text of Four Quartets could be perceived as so much like the great river of the Yangtze or probably also like the Mississippi, which makes the unforgettable part of Eliot’s childhood. When Four Quartets starts in “Burnt Norton,” it appears, for instance, as smooth, austere, and self-contained, as if with “emotion recollected in tranquility,” as the Yangtze in the utmost northern part of Qinghai-Tibetan plateau where it rises as the upstream of the Great River. Starting with “East Coker” and then “The Dry Salvages,” the opulence of emotion no longer appears containable in the same austere classic pattern as of “Burnt Norton.” The two pieces in fact run more and more like the turbulent midstream of the Yangtze, particularly with the numerous tributary waters becoming part of its massive currents. “Little Gidding,” however, brings calm and peace along with a tone and pace of reconciliation to Four Quartets in a relaxed, smooth flow of common style of language very much in ways as the steady downstream of the Yangtze, which seems to come finally to terms with whatever georgical constraints that confine and define its vital energy and flow. If this is the case that shows how “still” may suggest a possible overview of a hidden narrative pattern which could then be timely understood in terms of whether, how, or how many “still” is used, so should this be the case with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Hollow Men.” In fact, quite perspicuously in neither is “still” ever used. The former could certainly be too hesitant, trepid, or “etherized” to even need “still” to be used to suggest

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any possible motion or emotion in the very circumstance where everything could be naturally as passive as “When the evening [could] spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table.” If so, nor would there be any need for the use of “still” in “The Hollow Men,” in which even the whole world could be too hollow to make any sense. Indeed, if so, does it still really matter for anything to be still about or be the way it still is when everything is just about to “end[ ] / Not with a bang but a whimper”? In Ash Wednesday, however, as simultaneously text-enlivening and text-enlivened adjective and/ or adverb. “still” appears six times, including once in the phrase of “unstilled world.” In the poem’s live context, “still” suggests overflowing motion and punctures rhythmically the trajectory of its outbursts as meaningful but ambiguous “figure of speech” in ways so suggestive of the ambivalent motion and emotion.3 Certainly, with such an understanding of “still” as regards its subtle but vital actual presence or absence in the text, there would be further additional venues for us to understand the phenomenon of allusions used in The Waste Land. Like “still,” regardless of how fixed there could be the presumably known meaning of each allusion, a priori, an allusion’s actual meaning of reference, however, could vary as much significantly as “still,” a posteriori, ad infinitum, in the actual context that enriches the allusion that enriches it at the same time. Likewise, even beyond the best possible intension of the author’s, no matter how many there might be different versions of a given historical or mythologically known allusion, such as the one of Philomel’s or Fisher King’s, there could still also be as numerous possible additional contextually generated or inferable “new” meanings or versions. The “new” ones would not necessarily be confined only to the well-known versions of it in addition to Eliot’s presumable authorial intention of using it. Undoubtedly, with “still” remaining as such a vital and subtle verbal element and often appearing so at once text-enlivened and text-enlivening with immeasurable influences, a posteriori, the text of The Waste Land could be indeed so immeasurably explorable with infinite impacts of serendipity through one meaningful allusion that often so quickly leads to another. THEORETICAL IMPLICATION OF THE USE OF “STILL” FROM ACROSS CULTURES Apparently, from whichever perspective, the synaesthetic impact, as the commonplace word “still” so indicates, does often result from such occasional use of the simple common words in one way or another, possibly even in spite of the author’s own awareness or intention. The use of “still” in this context of The Waste Land could not only make everything so at once visual and auditory (or the other way around) but also inasmuch the same way as make

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past present or vice versa. With the turbulent emotion recollected in tranquility, this particular stanza, like some other ones, will also be discussed soon, especially the whole passage that makes the fourth part, undoubtedly appears as much steadily fluid as it is likewise calmly composed in such a way that suggests a clear-cut image as if so palpably sculpted in words or “glowed into words” only for the purpose or destiny to “be savagely still.” The phenomenon could therefore emerge as a natural but involuntary challenge to the classical concept of beauty and charm that Lessing argues about in Laocoon. It is because with the vivid images of the scene so painted or sculpted in words, everything likewise painted or sculpted in whatever ways associated with it in the worded world of The Waste Land would not only seem to move but also tend to stand impeccably still as clear-cut, palpable, and utterly motionless as a perfect still-life painting or a piece of statue in the utmost being of serene immobility. The image of the scene therefore not only suggests charm “by changing beauty into charm” because “charm is beauty in motion” but also still remains such a perpetually “transitory beauty” as if sculpted so perfectly still in motionless motion and therefore always evokes our “desires to see [it] again and again,” however much beauty and charm may not otherwise seem so compatible with each other as Lessing would so insist and then concede here. The assumed sovereignty of poetry as distinctively an art of the temporal mode and painting of the spatial mode, as Lessing so argues in Laocoon, indeed, often appears so arbitrary here in the context of The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. This is, however, not a case of artistic indiscretion that Lessing himself warns against, but rather a real instance, a posteriori, of genuine artistic creation that not only “dissolves, diffuses, and dissipates” but also transforms synaesthetically, as if with the magic power of “negative capability,” the “limits of painting and poetry” into artistic visions and voices in ways otherwise impossible.4 The case of The Waste Land thus further illuminates the literary phenomenon of synaesthesia, which could be not only conveniently identified in the familiar Western literary texts but also cross-culturally in the not-sofamiliar ones. In his poem “London,” as mentioned above, does not William Blake also clearly suggest how he not only hears, but also sees “the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls”?5 In Nostormo, does not Joseph Conrad likewise also describe how “the solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin, cord to which [Don Martin Decoud] hung suspended by both hands,” and how “the cord of silence snap[s] in the solitude of the Placid Gulf” with the self-inflicted gunshot that ends the passionate misanthropist or nihilist’s life?6 In the poem “Yu Lou Chun” 玉樓春 by Song Qi 宋祁 (998–1061), the poet, for instance, describes how the scenic beauty may come and go before we can even barely spare a moment to appreciate it. The poem expresses the sentiment of regretful joy

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with the floating, fleeting, and fragile moment or motion of life. In the last line of the first stanza, with the word 鬧 nào (loud, noisy, noises-making, or to make noises) as “le mot juste,” the poem captures the right moment when the scenic beauty is about to display its beauty and mood. Like the commonplace word “still” that could be taken in the live context simultaneously as adjective and adverb with the serendipitous impact of synaesthesia, so is the commonplace word 鬧 nào used at once as a verb and as an adjective in such a way that so vividly captures the moment, mood, and motion of the scenic beauty, which suggests a wonderful synesthetic experience as if the poet seeing and hearing simultaneously the sound of spring in its noisily colorful ways like the branches of apricots about to break into blossom in the springtime.7 However, vivaciously synesthetic as the description of the first stanza of the second part’s is, this ingenious use of the word, as Qian Zhongshu 錢鍾書 (1910–1998) first notices it, happens to be so harshly ridiculed as utterly “illogical” by the famous but straight-thinking critic Li Yu 李漁 (1610–1680). Qian, however, praises the use of the word as the exemplary case of “synesthesia” (通感). Qian discusses this case of “synesthesia” further on several occasions with an emphasis on 鬧 nào as the irreplaceable “le mot juste.”8 To make his case, Qian also refers to the mystics, such as Saint Martin, who confesses, “I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone.”9 In both “Tong Gan” and Guanzhui Bian,10 Qian mentions about the interesting cases in the Liezi (列子) regarding how one’s eye can hear like an ear, how one’s ear can smell like a nose, how one’s nose can taste like a mouth, how everything becomes so instantly interconnected, and how all the usual distinctions or forms of things quickly disappear when one’s mind and heart appear so fully in concentration.11 These cross-cultural literary cases as the “involuntary allusions” through the active participation of the readers as “mon frère” should indeed further strengthen or improve our understanding of the text of The Waste Land especially in ways not as Goethe often so deplores as in Pandora regarding how we as humans are so “destined, to see the illuminated, not the light.” With such illuminating “involuntary allusions” from across the cultures, we would probably be able to see both the illuminated and the light now. A PERSONAL ACCOUNT AS REFERENCE Indeed, with everything so immaculately depicted in the first stanza with such syn/aesthetic values, it should not be a surprise to see how there would also so naturally emerge such epistemologically significant issues as to whether everything so depicted is a scene of past or present, whether it is a picture on the wall, a scene that “window gave upon,” or whether it is of

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a real, painted, or simply imagined scene. With the echoes of the nightingale’s sounds of cry becoming so synaesthetically visualized or visualizable, they do often appear having filled our hearts as much as they have still “Filled all the desert with inviolable voice”; the sad echoes would still linger simultaneously inside us as outside us as if “still she cried” so audibly in silence with her “inviolable” sad voices; “still she cried” so motionlessly in motion from past to present in ways so timely timeless across any conceivable spatiotemporal boundary from within as from without. Is it then not also possible for us as readers to come out as much naturally as with such ontological bewilderment as well, “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? . . . Do I wake or sleep?” Even if all the discussions as above are absolutely intended only for one single primary purpose, that is, to clarify the confusion, they instead seem to complicate further the epistemological or even ontological confusion as regards the literary scenario, as if the more with everything so attempted for clarification, the more embroiled a case would there emerge. However, regardless of how likely everything of it could be so at once realistic and surrealistic, this synaesthetically sense-bewitching and mind-bewildering scene could undoubtedly still be adequately understood in terms of a personal experience of my own; it could still be understood, in other words, with a book cover picture of a memoir that a friend of mine wrote and sent to me as a gift upon its publication. In the book cover picture, my friend, Joe Brickner, is featured standing left side against a huge window of his fancy CEO office of the Southwestern Bell company’s regional headquarter at St. Louis with his left hand laid on a basketball placed upon the window sill; right outside the window, there is the beautiful arch, the most distinguished landmark of St. Louis.12 With the picture taken in such a way and the arch so close to the window, the famous landmark appears not only so perfectly fit to the size of the window but also becomes so impeccably part of the window. The scene, therefore, did not appear so much at the first sight as a scene but a larger-than-life picture as it did thus occur to me initially. Indeed, initially, the window did not happen to look like a window but a wall with a huge picture hanging there, upon which there were painted not only my friend Joe but also the famous arch. Even after my second look, it still occurred to me as if my friend Joe was literarily standing side by side against the huge wall picture hanging there with a famous arch painted on it. No doubt, the book cover picture was so “deceptively” taken in such a way that the arch outside appeared so transparently opaque in the picture as if it were a part of the interior decoration of a huge glassy wall. Whichever way I took my look at it, the arch appeared so magnificently Zen-like in the picture in ways so much like the pure and simple piece of an ink painting hanging on the wall in my friends Pam and John Peck’s piano room; the ink painting was composed only of two semi-circles

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about to merge in the form of an arch. Likewise, simple as it appeared on the book cover, the moment when I saw it, the book cover picture simply kept me imagining the arch with the colorful rainbow-like reflections of the celestial motion, movements, and moods from differing angles at the different times of the day in ways as I thus saw it many years before in person on the actual site. It was not until I received an email from Connie, Joe’s beloved wife, I still remained so sense-bewitched with this mistaken wall painting, which actually became further alive in my imagination fed upon my actual experience seeing the arch on the spot in the past. From Connie’s email message, I then realized that it was a real photo picture taken in Joe’s office with the arch there right outside of the window. However, without such an email from Eliot, would it be possible, ever, for us to figure out whether everything so depicted in the first stanza of the second part is of a real scene, an actual painting hanging on the wall, or a purely imagined piece, “[a]s though a window gave upon the sylvan scene”? The situation could probably be further grappled in terms of such a scenario. When a taxi driver asked his customer at the backseat near an intersection, “Turn left?” All he received then was the answer “Right!” With a reply that terse, there would certainly be a moment of confusion immediately occurring on the part of the driver until additional instruction or clarification be given upon request. However, as with this particular scenario, what if there would be no such immediate clarification possibly from the author, who would be dead the moment he completed his work at least in terms of what Roland Barthes would so remind us as the author’s “hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère”? We as readers therefore must assume the responsibility to make a decision on behalf of the author in order to move on with the reading process unless we would still remain as much aesthetically intoxicated with such a thing or scene of pure beauty as Keats was with his nightingale “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? . . . Do I wake or sleep?” However, even after I was so timely awakened by the email message to the fact that the painted huge picture hanging on the wall was actually a real scene, each of my glimpses at the book cover picture later on would still bring me a mysterious sense as if everything of the book cover photo picture were still a painted picture of still life. The photo picture brings me a subtle perpetual sense of stillness from time to time across the usual boundary of time and space in ways as much as the picture of the depicted woman in the stanza does. The way she sits so still in the chair gives so much the sense-bewitching and even soul-bewildering subtle motion, which appears so utterly unexplainable unless in terms of such an equally “bizarre” scene of “glimpses” that Kawabata describes in the beginning chapter of Snow Country. The scenario of the “glimpses” occurs with the eyeball of a pretty girl’s caught on a window of a fast-moving night train while she was staring impassively toward

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outside from her window seat. The eyeball then transforms itself into the nexus or the focal point where everything overlaps in rapid succession from inside and outside. In this way, the eyeball reflects the impenetrable darkness outside, the glimmering dimness inside, the curious pupil of a man staring at the beautiful eyeball on the window from behind her, and the glittering second that occurs to the pupil and the curious pupil in the pupil as the dim light inside glides occasionally with glimmering lamp light outside the window. Indeed, as reflected in the exquisitely melancholic Japanese novel, each of such glimpses that so occurred seems to have been occasioned through a simple and humble “transparent eyeball” that would become in the specific context so “transparent” to be transparently opaque to resemble a window and mirror at the same time. Indeed, this motion could probably also be further understood cinematographically in terms of “montage” and “persistence of vision.” Once again, these terms often refer to the optical illusion whereby multiple discrete images become blended into a single image in the human mind and are believed to be the explanation for motion perception in cinema and animated films. “Persistence of vision,” in other words, thus suggests how the film actually runs with a pause by every second, however imperceptibly the way it occurs, so that it would be optically possible for our pupils to have the time they need to absorb each of the discrete cuts and to piece them together in a smooth flow of uninterrupted scene on the screen. Otherwise, all we could see on the screen would be nothing but flurried and blurry images in rapid succession. Likewise, contrary to our impression, the meaning of reading could equally be understood as realized not exactly through the actual incessant, nonstop motion but through the imperceptible mediation of pauses, actually often through the imperceptible but indispensable mediation of too trivial to be noticeable function words. Regardless, as it all thus happened, the scene so depicted in the beginning stanza of the second part of The Waste Land does bring us this unsolved or insoluble sense of mystery, which we as readers must handle it all by ourselves. We must be, in other words, so unfortunate to take it all upon ourselves as orphans, be it in the role of readers or humans, if the author is indeed as much dead as Roland Barthes so declared in the wake of Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclaimed the death of God. MESSAGE OF HOPE IN BOND-MAKING NONSENSE-TALKING AND BARRIER-MAKING TEAM EFFORT As indicated by such a desperate-sounding plea for a talk that starts the second stanza, “Stay with me. / Speak to me . . . Speak . . . I never know what you

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are thinking. Think.” Who is the person talking? To whom is he or she talking to? Is he or she talking to himself, or herself, to a real person, to someone as imagined or as ghost-like as Hamlet’s diseased father? As to the possible identity of “I,” who is the “I” at this point and around this moment? Is he still the one single protagonist-narrator, the persona himself? Is he still the same person so indispensable for the narrative of the wasteland to start and move on in the first place, that is, inasmuch the same way as the mysterious person who appears so indispensable even for God as one of “us” upon whom God apparently so depends to proceed with his narrative as much as with his process of creation itself? As an indispensable collaborator or collaborators for the process of creation, be they real or imagined, the indispensable presence or function of the person(s) certainly appear so firmly confirmed with such repetitive reference from God to him or her or them as “let us”; it is particularly the case when the creation or the narrative itself emerge as such a crucial team work that needs the indispensable Thou or Other as Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas would both emphasize though in different ways. The person(s) God refers to could be certainly as elusive or even illusive but absolutely indispensable as Godot in Waiting for Godot, so equally indispensable is also Lil whom everyone is talking about as the very focus of topic or linking point that gets the conversation going along with the hard-to-pinpoint “I” as the person who is talking or whom someone is talking to.13 With this understanding, it would then make sense to go back to the beginning scene. Is “I” who speaks to the lady the person in the picture? If not, is she the lady in the room with the picture? Either way, real or imagined, is the lady in the picture or in the room with the picture who speaks to “I” or who speaks as “I”? The scenario here is therefore by no means clear especially with regard to who is speaking to whom, neither, as a matter of fact, is there such a need to be so. However, what is always clear of this apparently forever mind-bewildering scenario, nonetheless, is the absolute necessity of talking even of sheer nonsenses, which is undoubtedly such a special form of communication always performed as positive results-yielding activity of doing in the usual disguise of nonsense-talking. Therefore, be it of sheer nonsense-talking or somehow sensemaking, this activity of talking itself makes something productive happen through its indispensable but invisible agency in shaping and maintaining a community. Indeed, even if nobody could ever truly ­understand one another inasmuch the same way as “I never know what you are thinking, Think,” the speaker still insists the other to “think,” which means to come out with anything to talk about, apparently for the sheer necessity of keeping him in company. The “I” needs his company, “Stay with me. / Speak to me,” especially when he himself could not talk about anything sensible, either, or have anything else to talk about other than mere nonsenses with the excuses, such as all “[his] nerves [being] bad tonight.” The necessity

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is apparently as great as it is so revealed in Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” as even in Hemingway “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” We often even need just a tiny, clean, well-lighted spot to feel ourselves in the company even of total strangers. For this “pleasure” or necessity for company, we can even talk utmost nothing but nonsenses or simply stay in sheer silence. Nonsense or silence therefore apparently communicate in this way, as in Thoreau’s words, about the “quiet desperation” we share through the sense of alienation and the secret desire for company and community. Apparently, so much in The Waste Land are not said or impossible to be accurately said of due to the innate deficiency of our common language, which is “designed,” as previously discussed, so ironically only for the general or common usage. Even so, there is still so much that has been vividly shown or performed through nonsenses or silence. Does not this scene convey or communicate once again not only the fundamental issue of incommunicability and the toothache-like annoying sense of alienation? Does not this sense of alienation haunt our common humanity in the wasteland of our increasingly globalized but further fragmented world of modernity? Do we all not, at the same time, appear so busy, if not utterly in vain, as “modern man in search of a soul” or “à la recherche du temps perdu”? As all the cases of conversation in this part so indicate, such as the one about Lil, we nonetheless often so serendipitously notice how incommunicability could not only communicate but also surreptitiously shape a community, however temporarily, through nonsense and silence, which could perform as a result-yielding act of doing.14 Therefore, as the case with such an urge for talk so indicates here, what truly matters in this regard is whether there is indeed a conversation going on or performed to have a dialogue between past and present as between everything current in ways that could be so simultaneously real and surreal. For this purpose, it may not even seem to really matter whether the persons who make the conversation across the aisle really communicate or not. Neither does it seem to matter whether there is really anything meaningful to be communicated about or to be even possibly communicable in the first place. What truly matters, however, is apparently whether such a process of communication occurs and continues between the “I” and anyone whom he is talking to in ways as much as there is always someone’s life to talk about even of one as ignorable as Lil’s. This incommunicability of communication thus communicates profusely or simply performs so communicatively in ways that reveal the utterly unutterable meaningful “meaning” of absurdity and meaninglessness of life inherent in or remaining hidden from behind everything that could be so easily made sense of. As the cases with all the conversations in The Waste Land, particularly these ones in this part, the issue at stake is therefore no longer who’s talking to whom but rather whether there is any possibility to make sense of life itself when it is not even possible for

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us to tell who’s who or whether there is even any necessity to tell them apart; the issue is what is actually occurring with the inevitable humanity-affecting impact consequently when there is nothing else but sheer nonsense to communicate with or when it is neither necessary nor possible even to know who is talking of who and who is talking of what and for what. Regardless, neither is it possible, as the case with Lil, to figure out who is really talking to whom of whom and for what, nor is it likely for us to figure out who is the lady sitting in the chair, especially in terms of whether she is a real person or merely a figure in the painting involved in a real or imagined conversation. Regardless, either way, there would still be meaningful dialogues across whatever obvious and hidden spatiotemporal boundaries or barriers from both within and without us through whatever nonsensical or absurd scenarios as long as they would thus keep us stay engaged in “conversation” or in the process of thinking even of the unthinkable as the “I” so insists, Cogito, ergo sum. Indeed, however truly, “I never know what you are thinking,” but, for God’s sake, “think,” the nonsensical conversation makes everyone alive as a human who is involved in the conversation or thinking of something or anything to say for the conversion, however temporarily, particularly through the community that comes into being in the process; the effort for a talk to one another in this regard works regardless of how “meaningless” or “nonsensical” everything so involved as topics or as thoughts could possibly be with the conversation itself so centered around Lil’s squalid life or the nonsenses of “Shakespearian Rag.” The community comes in shape on the spot in the process because of the conversation upon the nonsensical topics of someone else’s squatty life, which however so ironically becomes the common ground for the talking community to “hang out” together. Furthermore, even if just in such a paradoxically absurd way, “I think, therefore I [still] am.” The Cartesian rule apparently still applies. Undoubtedly, these scenarios could appear so utterly absurd or nonsensical because the persons involved in the conversion often do not even seem to have anything meaningful to say to one another other than the sheer necessity or desire to say something or anything to one another as a way to “hang out.” The conversation, in other words, must be kept going in this expedient way for as long as it is so desired and for whatever social relationship or bond to be made or maintained in this way however temporary as it would possibly be. Whether formulated or formulable in any clear sensemaking way as questions and answers, in the context of The Waste Land, even nonsenses do communicate in this way. Indeed, as in the second part, neither does one know what to ask but beg the other to speak to him/her, nor does one even know what to speak to the other, let alone to know what the other actually wants other than just talking to him/her or just staying in company this way. Consequently, neither of them have anything to talk to one another but sheer

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nonsenses in ways as Wittgenstein would so define the situation; it is however exactly this nonsense-talking or meaningless noise-making process that appears to have been conveying meaning or at least keeping alive the two persons in their lifeless lives. They are, in other words, kept alive as they stay actively engaged with one another not only in ways that might appear so compatible with the scene of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot but also with that of Robert Frost’s well-known poem “Mending Wall.” WALL-MENDING AS BOND-MAKING THROUGH NONSENSE-TALKING AS DOING THINGS TOGETHER With the references to “Shakespearian Rag” and Lil’s story as expedient “nonsensical” replies to the requests for a “conversation” to “hang out” with, the particular scene of The Waste Land, therefore, becomes instantly relevant as a mutually illuminating case along with the special wall-mending scenario so vividly depicted in Robert Frost’s well-known eponymous poem; it is particularly so in terms of how the nonsense-making conversation makes meaningful scenario by the actively collaborative or participatory meaning-performing means. When the commonsensical saying “Good fences make good neighbors” appears so frequently repeated by the anonymous neighbor, it becomes as much a sheer “nonsense” especially when the dilapidated wall stands as nothing more than a sheer piece of “junk.” The wall indeed stands there all year along as such a pathetic eyesore on the otherwise perfect landscape yet to be further fenced into “property owned by Miller, Locke, or Manning,”15 along with “the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects” for “the charming landscape” consequently becoming thoroughly destroyed or disintegrated. Also, the wall simply remains in this way a pure piece of a nuisance, a sheer symbol of barrier, obstacle, segregation, self-isolation, in addition to being such a pathetic eyesore in contrast with the otherwise immaculate natural beauty of the landscape. The wall would therefore also stand there in ways as Wittgenstein would consider a nonsense because there would not be a meaningful question to be ever possibly formulated about it in anticipation of an equally formulable answer, that is, as “something [that] can be said” about it as an answer.16 For, as it is indicated in the poem, there is simply no answer for the question about the wall, such as why do we need the wall in the first place? “What I was walling in or walling out” and “Why do [good fences] make good neighbors?” There is simply not “something [that] can be said” about it as an answer to the questions. However, quite ironically, exactly just because of that, the wall also thus becomes the indispensable foundation of a bond-making community. The useless wall becomes, in other words, so instantly useful by bringing together

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the two persons; they would otherwise never even have met with each other, let alone to have known and accepted each other as collaborating neighbors despite a possible abyss of differences between them. The one as the anonymous “neighbor,” for instance, is so much “like a one stone savage armed,” who takes everything so mindlessly for granted as long as it is what his father said, whereas the other, the speaker, is such a thinking individual who likes to question everything including the very wall-mending business he is so involved annually. The abyss-wide and deep differences make them talk to each other without literally communicating and communicating without the possibility for mutual understanding. Together, however, they define or redefine the old fence-making tradition. With them and through them, the good fence does then really start to make them good neighbors in this regard, but ironically not in ways as it is so blindly taken for granted at the very beginning by the neighbor and his father. The wall is thus mended as the role-playing activity that mends or makes humanity-defining relationships, par excellence. The wall as much as the nonsense of conversation occurring between them creates the common ground for them to have something in common to share with one another as a part of the serendipitously bond-making activity or process for every year. Even if there would never be a possible answer to the questions in ways as the speaker so wonders as “What I was walling in or walling out” and “Why do [good fences] make good neighbors?” the actual process of making these two otherwise total strangers work together as collaborating neighbors thus formulate a legitimate answer even probably still so far beyond the immediate awareness of either’s, if at all. Only until this very moment do the good fences really seem to make good neighbors by bringing these two strangers together as neighbors to build a community upon the common ground marked by the wall. Indeed, so ironically, on the one hand, there is apparently no raison d’etre for repairing the dilapidated and utterly “useless” piece as wall because “He’s all pine, and I’m apple orchard. / My apple trees will never get across / And eat the cones from under your pines,” especially in terms of all the time and effort spent in doing it every year, if not as “just another sort of outdoor game.”17 At the same time, however, all the time and efforts spent in repairing this piece of junk becomes so fully or fruitfully justified with regard to its serendipitous function or meaning in facilitating a bond-making and communitybuilding process or simply as “just another sort [bond-making] outdoor game,” even if the actual benefits remain utterly unknown to both involved in the activity. For the speaker, there is even further unknown benefits, that is, for him to become a better-thinking individual, cogito, ergo sum, through questioning the meaning or the validity of the values as regards the very wallmending business he is so involved with but also remains so skeptical about. Even if it would be so unlikely for him to get or “formulate” any right answer

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in any formulable meaningful way, if at all, as regards what he is questioning about, he, nonetheless, so clearly defines himself by thinking for himself, by himself, and thus truly becomes himself in this very way especially through the bond-making process with another human upon the common ground of their own making as so marked by the wall in the otherwise “meaningless” wall-mending annual activity. Indeed, without this very activity upon this very place, neither would it be possible for the persona in Frost’s “Mending Wall” to become in this regard a truly “autonomous” Cartesian self, that is, if without such a specific place for him to think in, a particular person for him to think with, a special circumstance for him to think under, and an actual obstacle or problem for him to think through or against. Is this not thus also a quite compatible case with the scenario concerning the famous conversation between Zhuangzi and Huizi by the riverside of Hao? In fact, this persona’s human-becoming thinking process itself would not even be possible if it is not contingent upon the very presence or collaboration with the “savage” of his neighbor in ways so reminiscent of Queequeg, who seems so accidentally but as if also quite predestined to become as in Melville’s words such a “strange bedfellow” with Ishmael. Indeed, even if between the narrator as “a skeptical soul” and the neighbor as a mindless “savage” there could hardly be any genuine possibility for real dialogue, the conversation itself creates at least a de facto community built on a common ground through the occasions of talking as a bond-making pragmatic act of doing things together, an obstacle-resolving process of engagement. Together, they create in this otherwise utterly nonsensical process of communication a bonding community built upon the common ground they seem to have carved out of the space upon and around the dilapidated and useless wall through their peculiar “speech act” and their role-playing activity as neighbors. Is this not the compatible case with The Waste Land? Even if, in the second part of The Waste Land as in “Mending Wall,” it is still so unclear as to who talks whom of what, there is however a community that is quietly coming into shape through the process of communication itself by means of sharing nonsenses. This very occasion therefore becomes so instantly meaningful in this nonsense-facilitated or nonsenses-sustained relationship building and bond-making and common ground-carving process even on the very ground of a wasteland. Be it a conversion that occurs across any conceivable spatiotemporal boundary or even between whatever illusive and real partners, the conversation in the live context of The Waste Land as in “Mending Wall” makes everything otherwise unconnected connected, irreconcilable reconcilable, meaningless meaningful, incommunicable communicable, and even hopeless hopeful, This is undoubtedly such a hidden lesson inherent in The Waste Land as in “Mending Wall,” which, however, still needs, as Goethe himself would so insist here, these additional serendipitous

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allusions from readers as the mutually illuminating lights from across cultures as from across disciplines for us to understand the rich meanings of the meaningful nonsenses, which characterize so much of the text of The Waste Land as of that of “Mending Wall.” The readers are, after all, the indispensable “mon frère” of the text.18 CONCLUSION: MAKING NONSENSES MEANINGFULLY COMMUNICATIVE Indeed, now with the issue of how to deal with “nonsenses” of this second part of the poem understood in this way, The Waste Land would then also seem to emphasize to us how even under the nonsensically despairing circumstances of the wasteland, there would still be as much meaning as hope for us to mend our life with; there would still be, in other words, the life-invigorating opportunities for us to grasp or grapple them as if from the inexhaustible matrix of void as the forever deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, however often the life itself may appear as much nonsensical as beyond our immediate comprehension for communication or interpretation. Therefore, as long as there is such a life-invigorating matrix of the void, there would still be the tenacious hope for humanity to survive whatever hopelessly nonsensical version of wasteland, be it remaining hidden around within or without us. For exactly the same reason, neither would there be anything utterly incommunicable, be it often expressed as the seemingly parodic or nonsensical references to classical literature, pop art, such as the “Shakespearian Rag,” or any as hard-to-make-sense of the phenomenon of life as of the picture with the lady sitting in the chair or the much-gossiped life of Lil. Nor would there ever be anything remaining as much utterly waste or purely nonsensical, be it termed as “the waste land” or “the paradise lost,” as long as there is such a thing as vicissitude of life or seasonal changes even if exemplified by “the cruelest month” of April. With such irreducible vicissitude of life, everything of the wasteland would then instantly become as much as an infinitely explorable living space of nature as an inexhaustible void of deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies; however likely everything, in other words, may so often appear at the first sight as nothing but jumbled nonsenses, they would instantly become as much the inexhaustibly rich and sustainable mineral deposits as all these seemingly meaningless jumbles of colors and shapes of Picasso’s or Kandinsky’s artworks or the resonantly chaotic noises of jazz. Clearly, from the woman sitting in the chair, the chanting of the “Shakespearian Rag,” and the ignoble life of Lil’s, regardless of how there would be nothing appearing meaningfully connected at the first sight,

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everything in the text of The Waste Land ultimately remains as deeply interconnected with one another in a further meaningful way; there is always an infinitely meaning-absorbing and meaning-generating void that timely mends our real world as much as our worded world from behind, beneath, and between everything on the surfaces. Be it as elusive or even illusive as in the form of the woman in the chair or the ghostly life of Lil’s, everything remains as substantively realistic and surrealistic in The Waste Land in as much the same way as we would feel about the “picture” of Dorian Gray while “waiting for Godot” or “looking for Mr. Green.” Lil’s life and the woman in the chair’s could be so utterly incompatible because they appear not only so far apart in time but also in social stratums, but they are ultimately not so far apart, if at all. They are as much the mermaids singing hollow men’s the swan song of the wasteland as they are equally exemplary as regards how they suffer as much as with so many “withered stumps of time [as] Were told upon the walls” thus in ways so reminiscent of “the hapless Soldiers sigh / [that] Runs in blood down Palace walls.” Certainly, there would also be as many such “withered stumps of time” that were timely “told upon the wall” as the “soldier’s sigh” so visibly carved upon Lil’s merely thirty-one years old face, which, however, already “look[s] so antique.” Therefore, from the woman in the chair to Lil’s told life through the “Shakespearian Rag,” and with the readers in the role as “mon semblable,— mon frère,” the three stanzas that make the second part of The Waste Land appear so meaningfully as the live nonsensical performance. They appear in ways so much reminiscent or parodic of Beethoven’s Sonata quasi una fantasia of the wasteland, which begins with the ages-old roaming echoes of nightingale’s sad “inviolable voices” that linger like “the withered stumps on the wall”; it then moves like an apparition of the moonlight aimlessly roaming around in shadows there; it ends up with a stormy moment of insanity after a brief occurrence of tepid, staggering, and stumbling notes. What is so particular of this special sonata of apparition however is the “Shakespearian Rag” that makes the second stanza. When the speaker is asked to say something, he seems to have nothing else to say but resorts only to the “Shakespearian Rag,” which, however, appears as much a meaningfully nonsensical chanting as the famous nursey rhythm of “London Bridge is falling down falling down” at the concluding part of The Waste Land. The speaker improvises as much as he could with this pop jazz piece on the spot as if only to keep the conversation going as indefinitely as possible regardless of whatever he could say or know how to say could be nothing else but pure nonsenses. Indeed, he could only rely on talking nonsenses when there is nothing else he could talk; he could therefore only rely on making nonsenses or remain in silence when there is nothing else he can say as Wittgenstein so argues. Undoubtedly, whenever nonsenses occur, it means that there remains

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nothing that can be said in words to have any sensemaking formulable pattern, such as in the form of a question, which would be as much guaranteed or ensured as with an answer in a corresponding form of a compatible structure. But nonsenses in the text, such as the “Shakespearian Rag” makes the conversation going in ways as effectively as the useless “good fences” that make good neighbors. Indeed, this scenario could be made to indicate as a parody of how the poem could be effectively assembled as a jumble of contextualized “nonsenses” with various ready-made pieces from widely different sources; it indicates, in other words, how the piece of jazz-like mosaic could function as effectively as a meaningful piece of poetry in ways so much like Frost’s useless wall that makes a solid community even of the otherwise total strangers. With the literary scenarios of these three stanzas understood this way, what appears initially so incommunicable as sheer nonsensical would instead mean as much as even possibly beyond wherever or whatever our usual rational thoughts could regularly lead us to; it would lead us, for instance, to the recognition of sign of absolute sanity in the utmost insanity in The Waste Land as in Hamlet, Kear Lear, and The Tempest, among various others, in ways as “Shakespearian Rag” would so remind us of. Be it as intended or otherwise, be it as a scene of sheer madness or nonsense, “there is,” for Lord Polonius, always “method in ‘t,” which speaks or performs truth in each of the above cases. Therefore, as if inherent in every single hard-to-makesense of allusion at least initially in terms of the literary context where it is applied, the allusions’ often nonsensical appearances in The Waste Land thus do not often seem to make much sense, if any, until they are appropriately taken as meaningfully performing nonsenses or until they are no longer merely approached as regularly as pieces of statement, narration, description, or proposition; they must be, in other words, adequately approached as the “sweeter, unheard melodies” from behind, beneath, between, and even beyond the mere regular tunes. The ultimate or culminating truth of the allusions, therefore, could only be heard or understood through these “sweeter, unheard melodies” of the nonsenses here at this point as exemplified by “Shakespearian Rag” or Lil’s story as later by the alluded Fire Sermon in the third part and the sounds of “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih,” which echo in “the dry sterile thunder without rain” in the last part as “sweeter, unheard melodies” of the holy message from the Upanishads. Ultimately, in The Waste Land as elsewhere, it seems that the truth, in other words, could be understood as if only through languages of madness in ways as Foucault would so suggest as much as Freud, Lacan, and even Don Quixote, who died the moment when he is awakened to his “reality-acknowledging” sense or sanity from his truth-revealing and truthperforming insanity. Indeed, neither Don Quixote nor his legend would ever

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so abruptly die if not until the moment when the legendary dreamer or tragic/ comic hero truly forswears his feverishly upheld chivalric faith; it is not, in other words, for better or worse, until he appears so supposedly “awakened” to the almighty reality along with the utmost loss of the unique agency he once so marvelously performed, which is, indeed, so ironically his own special nonsense-making and yet truth-revealing “insanity.”19

NOTES 1. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 218, 85e. With reference to “langue” and “parole,” here again I follow Roger Ames’s example “to make a decidedly non-structuralist argument” as a means to my express “double-barreled antipathy toward both cultural relativism and cultural incommensurability” by borrow[ing] and adapt[ing] the Saussurian structuralist distinction between langue (universal and systematic linguistic structures and rules governing all languages) and parole (diverse and open-ended speech acts in any of our natural languages)” (xi). Indeed, “what is language [langue]?” For Ferdinand de Saussure, it is such a vital concept, which should be by no means in any way “to be confused with human speech [langage] . . . It is both a social product of the faculty of speech and a collection of necessary conventions that have been adopted by a social body to permit individuals to exercise that faculty. Taken as a whole, speech is many-sided and heterogenous; straddling several areas simultaneously physical, physiological--it belongs both to the individual and to the society; we cannot put it into any category of human facts, for we cannot discover its unity” (9). For Roger T. Ames, see Foreword in Chen’s Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody; for Ferdinand de Saussure, see Course in General Linguistics, trans. Wade Baskin with an Introduction and Notes (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 2. Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 56. It is is indeed as much the case in the context of The Waste Land as in the texts of Henry James’s later fictional works. 3. These are the compatible cases of “still” appearing in Ash Wednesday: “Because these wings are no longer wings to fly / But merely vans to beat the air / The air which is now thoroughly small and dry / Smaller and dryer than the will / Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still” (AW i). “Still is the unspoken word, the Word unheard, / The Word without a word, the Word within / The world and for the world; / And the light shone in darkness and / Against the Word the unstilled world still whirled / About the centre of the silent Word” (AW v). “The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying / Unbroken wings (AW vi). “Blessèd sister, holy mother, spirit of the fountain, spirit / of the garden, / Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood / Teach us to care and not to care / Teach us to sit still / Even among these rocks, (AW vi). 4. Lessing, Laocoon, 112. Indeed, for Lessing, charm and beauty do not mix, even if there is “another way in which poetry can draw even with art in the description

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of physical beauty,” which is “by changing beauty into charm.” It is because “charm is beauty in motion and for that reason less suitable to the painter than to the poet.” Therefore, “the painter,” as Lessing emphasizes, “can only suggest motion, because in reality his figures are motionless,” and “as a result, charm with [a painter] becomes a grimace,” whereas “in poetry it remains what it is, a transitory beauty that we desires to see again and again” and “it comes and goes; and since we cannot recall a movement more readily and more vividly than mere forms or colors, charm will in the same proportion be more impressive than beauty” (121). 5. Blake, “London,” 899. 6. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Dent, London: Everyman, 1974), 498–499. 7. For the convenience of reference, here is the poem (my translation): 東城漸覺風光好, Scenic beauty gradually turns around the east side of city, 縠皺波紋迎客棹. Ripples after ripples the river charms visitors on board. 綠楊煙外曉寒輕, Willows from behind chilly and misty morning air emerge green, 紅杏枝头春意鬧. In noisy blossom sticking out for Spring are branches of red apricots.

Prosodically, there could be possibly more “logical” and kinaesthetically competitive alternatives in terms of a wide range of spectrum regarding adequate verbal choices. Even if the same fourth-toned 俏 qiào (smart, bright, brisk, distinct) or 繞 rào (go around, turn around the corner), for instance, could be taken as the possible alternative to describe how springtime is indeed vivaciously around the corner with all the conceivable visual or sensuous implications, neither of them, however, carries the unique synesthetic flavor as the word 鬧 nào does. Nor could the secondtoned 嬈 ráo (graceful) possibly replace 鬧 nào without causing a total loss of the distinctly synesthetic impact that the original 鬧 nào carries around. This “illogical” use of 鬧 nào may not even sound that way at all when we take into consideration our various common expressions in English as in Chinese, let alone numerous literary cases across cultures. In English, there are, for instance, also such “illogical” but real synesthetic cases as regards how things may “sound cool” or “look hot.” Indeed, as previously referred to concerning the compatible scenarios in chapter 1, in Chinese, anything clearly audible or loud is often referred to as 響亮 xiǎng liàng, which literally suggests a synesthetic experience as both audibly distinct 響 xiǎng and visually bright 亮 liàng. So is the phrase 嘈雜 cáo zá (noises) in Chinese. The phrase indicates a similarly mixed or concurring synesthetic experience with 嘈 cáo (bustling; tumultuous; noisy) likely referring to sound experience and 雜 zá a visual one (mixed; miscellaneous; various; to mix); the phrase thus suggests how one may see the noisy sound as well as hearing it. Here, the concept of synesthesia could probably also be “visualized” for an analogous understanding or experience of it in terms of the Chinese character 馨 xīn (fragrance). The character 馨 xīn, for instance, not only looks like 響 xiǎng (sound as adjective or verb) but also contains in itself the “image” of sound, that is, 声 shēng, which makes up this simplified character or its traditional version 聲 shēng; the traditional character of “sound” 聲 shēng also contains in itself an image of “ear” 耳 ěr. Does not the character 馨 xīn (fragrance) in this regard seem to suggest that to smell fully the fragrance, one needs to use not only

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one’s nose but also one’s “ear, “to listen to the fragrance,” too? Song Qi’s “illogical” use of 鬧 nào as “le mot juste” therefore not only makes it so memorable the very line where it appears but also the whole poem. The poem, in other words, might not even stand out in any possible way as one of the most memorable classic pieces without 鬧 nào as “le mot juste.” What the poem is actually all about could otherwise sound too commonplace a subject matter to be barely noticeable in terms of Chinese literary tradition so rich with its poetic expressions regarding the seasonable vicissitude and the evoked human sentiments thereby. 8. Zhongshu Qian, “Tong Gann” (Synesthesia), in Bijiao Wenxue Yanjiu: Wenji (Comparative Literature Studies: A Collection), ed. Zhang Longxi and Wen Rumin (Studies: A Collection) (Beijing: Peking University Press, 1984), 21. 9. Ibid., 28. 10. Zhongshu Qian, Guanzhui Bian (Essays of Humble Reflections) (Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1979), 管錐編, 482–484. Such synesthetic experiences often vividly capture the full senses of my students however “inexperienced” as they otherwise might be in terms of art appreciation. As I myself can often hear music, such as Miles Davis’s “cool jazz,” in Ansel Adams’ “Moon and Half Dome,” Ryan Wolfe, a student of my Introduction to Humanities class (2: 00 MWF) Fall 2005, could not only hear but also see the sound of silence in the same piece. So could Amy Burgess, another student of my Introduction to Humanities (12: 00 MWF) Spring 2013, vividly see and hear at the same time “the crash of the sea back into itself” from the colorful visual image of Hokusai’s “Great Waves” as she thus wrote in her in-class analysis of the piece. 11. Qian, Guanzhui Pian, 482; Liezi, ed. Wang Libo, 84; Graham, Lieh-tzu, 77. 12. Joseph Brickner, So, You want to be a Coach . . . (Shawnee, KS: Sunne Pharms Publishing, 2020). 13. The phenomenon could even be understood in terms of the literary texts, such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Even if the eponymous character “lives” his life on stage no longer than the mere beginning part of the play, its influences however remain ever present and dominate every single move of Brutus, the main character, along with the entire narrative. In the same line of thought, there are also the cases with all these eponymous characters, such as Lord Jim and “Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’” by Joseph Conrad, Antigone by Sophocles, “Nigger Jeff” and Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, “Bartleby the Scrivener” by Melville, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and “Daisy Miller” by Henry James, along with Saul Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green.” Honoré de Balzac’s Le Père Goriot, and Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. 14. But what is modernity? Modernity literarily indicates, among many other implications, an overarching ideology, discourse, or mindset so obsessed with scientific models and standardization for absolute clarity, purity, and efficiency, and therefore utmost controllability—with zero tolerance for ambiguity and paradox. It is the mindset that prevails, as Toulmin describes in Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, often at the expense of healthy doses of humanism, skepticism, and tolerance through ideological indoctrination, abstraction, action of intolerance, and even violence, such as “revolution.” To create such a discourse of modernity that

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stresses rationalization or systemization for maximum efficiency and controllability, as Toulmin also analogizes, it is quite deplorable therefore for us to have simplified “Montaigne” into “Descartes,” reduced “Leviathan” into “Lilliput,” transformed “reasonable” into “rationale,” turned “ideas” into “ideology,” and, for me, sacrificed understanding for knowledge. Wittgenstein probably makes the concept even clearer when he argues in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that since modernity “the whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained” (1961,143). 15. Emerson, “Nature,” 6. 16. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.5.1.1. 17. A student of mine’s comment. 18. This nonsensical “fence-making” scenario could certainly be regarded coincidental but mutually illuminating with regard to the Upanishads especially in terms of its version of “Genesis” and the scenario concerning the indispensable humanitymaking and humanity-defining companionship. In Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, it is said, for instance, “In the beginning this world was just a single body (atman) shaped like a man. He looked around and saw nothing but himself. The first thing he said was. ‘here I am!’ and from that the name ‘I’ came into being” 1.4.3., 13). But “first being becomes afraid . . . when one is alone . . . He wanted to have a companion. Now he was as large as a man and a woman in close embrace” (Ibid.). For this piece, here would be another interesting and useful piece as cross-reference regarding Zeus’s work of bisection upon humanity’s challenge and origin of love in the chapter of “Symposium” in Plato’s Dialogue, which could also become an additional cross-reference to Genesis of Hebrew Bible and John Milton’s Paradise Lost side by side with the arrival of Enkidu in The Epic of Gilgamesh. As the indispensable companion or his humanity-upbringing Other created by goddess Aruru as planned, Enkidu eventually enlightens Gilgamesh of his dormant humanity making him “wise and week” or as real as a human being in The Epic of Gilgamesh along with the flood story. Furthermore, however, it may strike us as his usual involuntary sidekicks, this unique need for the humanity-defining or civilization-becoming companionship and communication also appears as Rousseau’s major focus in “Origin of Language” and “Origin of Human Inequality.” As in the latter, human civilization or “inequality,” for Rousseau, starts with communication and manipulatable companionship. When someone who is shrewd enough to pick up a rock and put it down on the ground to mark a place and declare “This is mine!” and to find another human foolish enough to be so persuaded to believe in him. This is, as Rousseau puts it, the beginning of human civilization and the origin of human inequality. Civilization therefore starts immediately with communication for persuasion to materialize the world through words. Still, in his profoundly simplistic way, Rousseau recounts his theme on the “origin of language.” Also, if to form a society requires at least two persons, whether on equal or unequal terms, it nonetheless must proceed through communication.

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Imagine someone, like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, who lives completely alone for a long time, until his meeting with his friend and slave Friday, suddenly encounters someone else in the jungle. He would then be, as Rousseau suggests, as surprised as if running into a monster. “This is a giant!” he cries out. However, the other may not actually be any taller or bigger than he thus appears to the scared fellow; this false factual statement not only truthfully reveals the inner feeling of the speaker but also marks the beginning of civilization. The rest certainly needs to be settled through further communication regarding who will be in charge. The first human society is thereby, according to Rousseau, built on communication or even miscommunication. See Paragraph Three of Chapter Three of “Essay on the Origin of Language.” 19. “My judgement is now clear and free from the misty shadows of ignorance with which my-ill-started and continuous reading of these detestable books of chivalry had obscured it” (Cervantes, 935). With one of these dramatic scenes of confession or repentance on deathbed, does it mean that Quixote is really awakened, “clear and free,” from his lifelong reverie? Would his awakening only mean, quite ironically, “death” in various other possible meanings in addition to and/or other than the actual one? Does it mean how a person thus awakened is then deprived of his “self”-defining capacity to pursue his dream or reverie however absurd or crazy as it could possibly be or simply be as so perceived to pursue his dream however absurd or crazy as his pursuit or reverie could possibly be or be as perceived? Does it only mean as a hopeless surrender to the mediocracy and vulgarly or a pathetic return to the mule-like life in the name of reality as James Wright and Robert Frost, respectively, suggest in “A Blessing” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” with triumph-sounding irony? Does it not sound like, in other words, a hopeless renounce of a cherished hope or pursuit yielding to the seemingly inescapable imbroglio of the humanity-depriving destiny of daily routine regardless of whether such pursuit might still eventually result in the soul-elevating moment of epiphany inside the suffering humanity? Does it ironically mean awakening only to death or to the moment when one “dies of the joy” over a dreadful prospect of returning to the old “caged life,” as with the respective case with Etnas and Mrs. Mallard in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and her minimalist short story “The Story of a Hour”? Does it mean the unending toil that Sisyphus must face with his all-defying “happiness”? Is Quixote’s “clear-minded” renunciation of the “absurdities” of his chivalrous pursuits only a radical reversal in disguise of the same pattern of absurdity that leads him “astray” or the same mentality that does “ flourish in the same hedgerow” (LG iii)? Does it not mean the same pattern of absurdity even when Creon cries out “all guilt is mine” but still remains an utterly unchanged person involuntarily exerting his hubris or his insatiable egoism in the form of humble repentance as if he was still as almighty as the only person who could be responsible for anything bad as for anything good? Does not Creon, in other words, still involuntarily exert his unchanged egoism by so arrogantly taking all the blames upon himself as if there would be no one else in the world who could be capable of such a power to turn the world so tragically upside down? Does not Cervantes also likewise open up a series of new rounds of narrative or reading where the current narrative seems to end with “complete simplicity” as does Four Quartets?

Chapter 3

Futility and Hope Retaining the Unretainable Life in Art as in Real World

Continuing with as much the same theme and mood as in the first two parts, the third part of The Waste Land, however, seems to move further toward a bleak and barren vision regarding the future of life. As it is so indicated in the initial passage that starts this part, the definite article in this part also appears as meaningfully performative as in the previous parts; it often even appears as if it could bring life to the sentences without a verb or as its perfect substitute, that is, “The river’s tent . . . the last fingers of leaf . . . the wet bank. The wind . . . the brown land . . . The nymphs . . . The river . . . The nymphs . . . the loitering heirs .” Indeed, in this initial stanza of the third part, “the” is used inasmuch the same way as in the second stanza of the first part; it is used, in other words, as surreptitiously transformed de facto verb or nominalized de facto noun, a posteriori. However, by exactly the same means of itemization in addition to or in spite of its regular grammatical role, the definite article “the” seems to be used here in this first stanza as if only to check on or confirm, sadly in a mood of resignation, the gradual departure and disappearance of life in ways as much as it is once used to check on or confirm the gradual arrival or recovery of life in the second stanza of the first part. Even so, in this part as much as in the first part, “the” does seem to have acquired in the due process “almost ‘a sort of personification’” in such a way as even to suggest a special ever-present power or influence of the persona even when he is literarily absent. This special power of an ever-present, perceiving- and performing-“I” who could remain as much influential as even so “invisibly” from behind the scene is undoubtedly, as previously mentioned, quite reminiscent of Ansel Adams. As an artist who creates the “Moon and Half Dome” or as the very person who “captured the magnificent work of God” as this pure image of nature so represents, he is always there ever present in his picture regardless of his actual absence from the artwork, which 185

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often appears so literarily as if not of anything else but such a pure image of nature. Indeed, such a brief comparative reference to Adams and his famous piece should hopefully bring us a further adequate view or understanding of the process as a verbal transformation that would become “almost ‘a sort of personification’” in ways as the use of “the” indicates. Undoubtedly, in whatever disguised or varied forms of absence, the perceiving-I in the context of The Waste Land as the one single protagonistnarrator does often appear as fully present as the deceptively fully absent “Ansel Adams” as an artist in the “Moon and Half Dome,” even if he would often appear as utterly absent as Adams is from the scene. Indeed, neither of the scenes would ever emerge with any spirit of life unless each one’s presence could be deceptively felt in spite of its actual absence from the respective scene. While the “Moon and Half Dome” could serve simultaneously as “window” and “mirror” for us to have at least a significant glimpse of Adams’s artistic genius whether he is immediately present or otherwise, the single protagonist-narrator in The Waste Land simply has so many masks for him to be about-face around with in addition to an equal number of subtly camouflaged outfits so conveniently set aside at his disposal. Regardless of how impossible for him to be physically there in the photo, Adam, nonetheless, is still capable of being fully present there as an artist in the “Moon and Half Dome,” which is virtually his own self-portrait. As Adams himself so suggests how he is always there in all his own works as the person he fully is, this piece indeed also displays all the possible “virtues” of him as the person who, as an artist, captures the “magnificent work of God” with all his passionate love of nature, his almost unsurpassable patience, endurance, and faith in what he is looking for along with his all-time readiness and quickness as an excellent “hunter” of the fleeing and floating moment of nature. Adams’s acute sensitivity of or aptitude for composition with everything that flows and flies as a trained former musician does also reveal itself significantly in the making of this visual composition. He must be an “idealist” and an “opportunist” alike to capture “the magnificent work of God.” Indeed, if everything is really so true of Adams in this way, would not the same is also true with the perceiving-I in The Waste Land particularly in terms of this initial stanza of this part at this moment? Certainly, as an artist the way he really is, Adams must be a person of passionate love of nature. He must also be as patient as Job. He must equally be a person who has enormous faith in what he is doing. It is simply because what he is so patiently waiting for may never show up, regardless of how he has already been hiking around in the area for more than three years in order to see his imagined ideal image finally emerge somewhere there. He must also have the real eye or sensitivity for timing, that is, for the perfect composition graspable from

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nowhere else but only from nature, that is, from its floating and fleeting moment, which is the rhythmic pace of nature or the cadence of “yinyang” because ultimately either the rhythm of nature or the cadence of “yinyang” means “the [immaculate] pattern of timing.”1 Adams’s professional training in music or piano does, as he so acknowledges in his autobiography, give him the good ear and eye for timing. Finally, “readiness is all,” as Hamlet so says, and he must also know when and how to “pull the trigger” or “push the button” with the perfect timing to eternalize the instant. As a result, thanks to Adam, we can therefore enter the same river twice or as many times as we want with this piece of artwork. We can also thus make our life worth living by simultaneously examining and living it at the same time in ways otherwise utterly impossible. Undoubtedly, very much like Adams, the perceiving- and performing-I is also thus fully absently present on the spot in this part. His full presence is in fact so significantly substantiated or deceptively substituted even with such power of “almost ‘a sort of personification’” through the effectively deceptive use of the vital and yet subtle agency of the simple function words, such as “the.” The effective use of the definite article could be particularly perceived in terms of the scene of the departing nymphs in such a way as if the perceiving-I, though in absence, is still so acutely observing everything as it occurs right on the spot in full presence. THE STORY OF “THE” AND MEANING OF NYMPHS Undoubtedly, here, in this crucial initial stanza, “the” is used in ways that result in, as much as it results from, a vivid image of Eliot’s or his persona’s acute mind. The mind appears so involved in everything about life in this world even to make itself often emerge as stubborn and absurd as that of Camus’ Sisyphus’s “The” is thus used, in other words, in such a seemingly casual but intense way that appears so reflective of the acute mind in distress as much in the haunting mood of disbelief as it tries so anxiously to find out whether or how the city could really become so depleted of its last or remaining sign of life following one departing “nymph” after another. With “the” being so used, the mind or the persona even often appears so anxious in ways as if all he wanted so much but ultimately all in vain were simply to detain the departing life by such a desperate means or measure of “itemization” as if it could cut short or abruptly end the continuous flow of departure. By the same simple participatory and performative means of itemization through each “the,” the passage seems to put every single detail into the same question as to whether everything of the scene is real or surreal, actual or imaginary after all. The passage consequently often appears in this way to surpass or bypass

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any conventional boundary or distinction regarding real and surreal as much as of past and present. The passage seems even to create such a synaesthetic impact of everything it involves with in the due process, that is, in making everything appear so simultaneously visual, audible, and in silence, while forever so motionlessly in motion as if everything could instantly become so much only about an utmost timely timeless world of an unusual spatiotemporal nature. “The” is indeed so used as if even to occasion such a parodic scene of an aesthetically sense-bewitching and soul-bewildering moment in ways as if so reminiscent of what occurred to John Keats. The persona may possibly appear as much confused as Keats, though absolutely by no means in a compatibly pleasant way; he is rather equally confused but in an utmost moment of distress as to where he is after all really alive or whether he does truly “wake or sleep?” or so ironically whether everything he experiences is merely “a vision, or a waking dream?” As such an ironically revealed impact or implication of the process of itemization, this silent desire and quiet desperation so performatively characteristic of the persona as he appears anxiously still trying so hard to hold on to the departing life and time would also likely to occasion such an ontological and epistemological bewilderment in ways as what happens to both Zhuangzi and Edgar Allan Poe. As previously also mentioned, one appears so confused one day after a dream not knowing whether he has dreamed a butterfly in his dream or he has simply been the butterfly that appears in the dream, while the other is simply doubting in distress whether life is after all “a dream within a dream.”2 Thus, as indicated in this stanza as in many others in the text, the function words, such as “the,” do become, as Seymour Chatman would again emphatically chime in here, “not merely being referred to [. . . but] are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, as substantial as any character” with a consequence of “almost ‘a sort of personification.’”3 Indeed, as it is so indicted, this third part would therefore become a true parody of all the utterly unparallel glories once as known of the Unreal City by different names. This part particularly depicts how all such glories fade gradually away and finally into endless miseries especially with the eventual departure of even the “nymphs,” which signals a total of metamorphosis when miracle becomes misery, vision degenerates into voyeurism, “ode to joy” begins to sound like a dissident chorus of nonsenses in ways as everything thus occurs in the text. Even the intensive but finite use of “the” in itemizing the departure of the “nymphs” could so ironically indicate or confirm how impossible or utterly futile as it would be for anyone with any attempt trying to detain life from departing; it would be even more so as with such a desperate attempt to itemize one departed nymph after another, let alone the infinite miseries of all once so glorious but now ruined Unreal City-becoming metropolises. With

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the departure of the nymphs, nothing “holy” would remain; even the angellike holy voices of children’s would become obnoxious noises; neither would there be any water that could wash away of the sense of despair from the fatally tainted wasteland, nor would there be, even for the royal company, any ingenious merry-making celebration that might bring back the joy long gone but the fake and faded noises from the past as from across the sea, such as the noisy “Weialala” chanting from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. Once again, in this third part as in all others, everything is thus parodically performed with varying rhythms for mockery. Clearly, “nymphs” here at least suggest various interrelated meanings. Their symbolic meanings could vary from the angels-like nymphs who bless the city of London to the prostitutes who remain as the only fitting substitutes of the city-blessing nymphs who have all departed no longer in favor of the city that falls so irreversibly into debauchery. Indeed, with the departure of the “nymphs” first as the city-blessing angels and then as a prostitute, that is, the most tenacious “parasites” of cities, for better or for worse, it means how swiftly or hopelessly the city is decaying and dying in ways utterly unbearable not only for the nymphs as angels but even for the nymphs as their unfortunate substitutes. The departure of nymphs in whichever possible sense still means the departure of spirit, hope, and even the bare possibility of existence. With streets emerging further deserted or laid so “waste” following the departure of one prostitute after another, the city appears as if utterly depleted of anything that makes a city a city; it appears in ways so unfitting as a city even in contrast with the bleak image of “London” in William Blake’s eponymous poem, Certainly, with the lines that indicate how “most through midnight streets,” one only hear “[. . .] the youthful harlot’s curse / Blasts the new born infant’s tear, / And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,” Blake’s “London” is by no means compatible with Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago” especially in terms of vitality and hope of life that Sandburg’s “Chicago” presents itself with in spite of the visible presence of “nymphs” as “painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.” Even so, such a visible presence of “nymphs” so referred to as the impaired but viable hope of life in “Chicago” only seems to suggest further in contrast how the remaining signs of hope are completely gone in Blake’s “London” and even more so in Eliot’s, which is so literally depleted of all the still lingering signs of life, but rats, with the gradual disappearance of the nymphs. Indeed, with the departure of the nymphs along with “their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors” who even “left [with] no addresses” for any possibility of a contact for future, neither is the river a possible symbol of purification or agency of rebirth but a lifeless flow of stagnant water no matter how the “Sweet Thames, run softly” and “bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, / Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends,” or any

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“other testimony of summer nights.” This scene so cleared of any traceable marks or stains of life would be even more horror striking than otherwise. In fact, as the case discussed in chapter 2 as regards how “the” and “and” are not used where they could have been used, the actual or potential power of function words, such as “the,” could indeed be further made sense of here not only in terms of how it is actually in use but also in terms of how it is actually not in use. This lifeless flow so suggestive of Thames as much as life, for instance, is certainly also significantly suggested by the absence of “the,” which is however just so used for the rhythmic impact of itemization as the de facto substitute of verb and/or noun with the suggested power of the substantive content words in the early part of the same stanza; the absence of it seems to deprive life so completely of its only remaining rhythm or trace of energy. THE ROLE-PERFORMING AGENCY OF I-YOU AND MESSAGE OF HOPE SUSTAINING LANGUAGE With this subtle but vital “the”-mediated message that leads the way, the third part starts its coverage of the wasteland with a vivid account of how everything once so splendid becomes squalid and how legendary turns into abominable; even the unparalleled vision of wisdom as Tiresias once so impeccably personified could appear so quickly degenerated into despicable voyeurism. Even so, there are still signs of hope from behind or through all the scenes of despair or “image of destruction.” Along with this general metamorphosis, there also emerges the particular metamorphosis of “I” in the company of his inseparable other “you.” The two would often thus appear together as “us” in ways as reminiscent as of the scenario in biblical text, as previously discussed in chapter 1, that is, “And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Genesis 1:26). The two would often thus appear together as if through a special bond-making and “us-confirming” performative relationship in ways as much perspicuously in effect in Genesis as in The Waste Land. Clearly, in either text, the “I” cannot be “I” without “you,” nor could the performative power of language perform in creating anything without the supportive network of relationship sustained by various I-coordinated and “you”-mediated versions of “him,” “her,” “them,” and so on. With no exception, this network of relationships defines even the divine power in the biblical text as in the Upanishads. In fact, starting with this particular initial stanza, this third part thus proceeds through different pivotal roles sustained by the collaborative and performative function of language, which shows, as the case with Tiresias, how the vision would quickly degenerate into voyeurism as a result of the squalid aspects of life that assault or corrupt not only the eyesight but probably also the heart of whoever that dare to steal a glimpse

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of them, however brief as such a glimpse might be. Through the performative power of language, the narrative in this part also reveals how anyone or anything, however heroic or legendary in ways as each used to be, would eventually end up inasmuch a dreary, abominably deformed, or emasculated state of being characteristic of Tiresias as of Fisher King. In fact, the third part delivers its messages through its performative “speech acts,” which effectively transform it into a most powerful “statement” of parody. This performative parody makes otherwise utterly incommunicable nonsenses meaningfully expressive, such as the lines of “Weialala” chants from Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. With the nonsensically sounding merry-making chants acted out in ways as much ironically as the nonsensically sounding lullaby of “the falling London Bridge,” the narrative of this particular third part would make the line sound like in this context a special copy of the grand piece of “Water Music” by George Frideric Handel, another distinguished German composer, for the celebrated moment of royal grandeur only to make the supposedly glorious present tour on the Thames merely an occasion of a pure farce. However, with scenarios of farce appearing so ironically revealed, what becomes further significantly revealed is the forever life-affirming message of hope so timely confirmed through the acute mind that appears so selfconsciously alive with the performative language. Interacting with the inseparable I-You bond that it simultaneously further strengthens, the collaborative and performative language functions effectively through each occasion of such interaction or bond that it strengthens thereby. Consequently, the message of hope thus always speaks clearly for the life-affirming sanity of the acute mind that not only sustains the irreducible message of hope but also further substantiates it through every scene or act of insanity that the acute mind exposes by means of satirical parody that lucidly differentiates facts from farce. At this point, it would be so hard not to recall the famous beginning lines of Karl Marx’s most readable 1852 piece on Louis Bonaparte’s coup The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. In the lines, Marx quoted Hegel first in terms of how “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great worldhistoric facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.”4 Then Marx emphasized how Hegel “forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”5 After giving cases to illuminate his points, Marx then argued how “the same caricature” occurs when the nephew tried to reincarnated himself for the uncle; Marx observed how “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living” but at the same time the living appear so bankrupted as the lesser minds utterly unable to come out with anything new themselves but have to “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored

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disguise and borrowed language.”6 Indeed, the scene as caricatured with the line “Weialala” chanting from Wagner thus performatively draws a picture of such a particularly ironical counterclockwise trajectory that traces how the meaningful becomes nonsensical and how nymphs turn out to be the prostitutes only to substitute a life of love, spirit, and hope with sheer debauchery and illicit promiscuous behaviors. Nonetheless, what remains further unique of this part of The Waste Land as with the rest is the remaining message of hope, which is there within every sign of despair, even if it is often so hard to detect it. Indeed, even with all these scenes of despair so depicted, there is always hope remaining hidden there with life as much as with despair. Similarly, as long as there is nonsense, there must also be meaning along with it, be it beneath or behind it, solely contingent upon how we might find ways to find it and decode it; as long as there is narrative, there must also be a narrative that performs or acts out meanings in ways otherwise impossible even vividly through sheer nonsenses. Likewise, despair always indicates and begets hope, as long as there is still “sweeter, unheard melody” of children’s laughter and the all-purifying fire that not only burns with desire but also burns out itself with everything it burns with in the due process for a thoroughly clear-up passage ahead. Even if all this could mean nothing more than merely an irreversible stage of transition or “a [performative] rite of passage” for the dying and death before the ultimate renewal of life and humanity,7 the hope is exactly so inextinguishably there in the performative “rite of passage”. This seems to be the central message of this third part especially through the acute and lucid mind; its lucid way of seeing and performatively exposing the insanity and absurdity of life by means of meaningful nonsenses and parodies is the life-affirming message or life-confirming manifestation of hope itself. FREQUENT ROLE-SHIFTING OF PERCEIVING-I AND SWIFT NARRATIVE MODES SWITCHING However, as the poem moves to this third part, it becomes more and more performative and in a further gloomy mood. Following the seemingly still quite cheerful chatting of April as the cruelest month that starts the first part to the steady pondering upon the old painting of ambiguous past-recounting still life on the wall that initiates the second part, the third part proceeds with a further deceptively calm or nonchalant but obviously further bleak panoramic view of the further deteriorating wasteland. Even if everyone still moves or the signs of life could still be spotted from time to time from everywhere, everything however still appears as if all under the same spotlight as nothing but mere signs of deterioration with equal signifying value, be it

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as spotted as Fisher King, Tiresias, Mrs. Porter, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant, royal families, rats, or simply all those who still hang on there so desperately to their dissipated lives, as usual, “après moi le deluge.” The narrative then appears so rapidly switching to a vigorously performative mode and mood especially when moving toward the lines of the noisy sounds of onomatopoeia as nonsensical parody “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala.” The poem then ends this part as abruptly as it occurs with this abrupt shifting of narrative mode. The impact is shocking with such abrupt switching of narrative mode and mood. The process of metamorphosis happens, as it so vividly acted out, as if so much forced upon the entire race of humanity as what is “So rudely forc’d” upon Philomel by the barbarous king (WL II, i) in the context; it is particularly so when the same sad lingering ripples of echoes “Twit twit twit / Jug jug jug” (WL III, ii) appear so mixed up with the nonsensically merry-making chanting of “Weialala leia / Wallala leialala” in addition to the most crucial line that ends Paul Verlaine’s “Parsifal,” that is, “Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!” However, even if so literally translated in English as “And O those children’s voices, singing in the cupola!” the line still suggests, along with the poem as a whole, a seemingly triumphant note especially with the subtle reference to Parsifal. As a “pure fool,” he still so reputedly maintains his utmost innocence, which would be so vital for him to be the maimed Fisher King’s successor, that is, as the keeper of the Holy Grail as far as one of the versions of this legend thus goes. Indeed, according to all the related legends, only the person who maintains his innocence in ways as pure as children could eventually be qualified to become the keeper of anything as holy as the Holy Grail. Undoubtedly, even if such invaluable innocence could often make one appear as foolhardy as Parsifal, as simple-minded as Enkidu, as straight-minded as Horatio, or as a little too radical as Thoreau, that is, as much a person of action upon the uncompromisable principles at least in terms of Emerson’s view of this pupil of his, it would still make each one of them to be the best possible “other” respectively to Fisher King, Gilgamesh, Hamlet, and Emerson, however much each in his own way could often be so pathetically only the “lesser” version of the original.8 As the concluding line from Parsifal also indicates, only such innocence as pure as children’ could then suggest or occasion such a miracle as “leap of faith” in ways as St Augustine himself so experienced. This miracle-occasioning scenario occurred, for instance, with a sudden moment of revelation through a passage from St. Paul’s epistles after Augustine heard one afternoon in the garden a child’s sing-song voice repeating, “Take up and read.” Augustine then found on the table laid a collection of Paul’s epistles he had been reading. When he picked it up, the first thing he saw was the passage: “Not in reveling and drunkenness, not in lust and wantonness, not in quarrels

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and rivalries. Rather, arm yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, spend no more thought on nature and nature’s appetites.”9 Thereupon, “No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away,” as he thus wrote later.10 This incident therefore fruitfully transformed Augustine to a complete, thorough “spiritual conversion” to Christianity after so many years of lapses since his initial half-hearted or tentative “intellectual conversion,” as if with an accidental “leap of faith” in ways as Kierkegaard would so call it. Is this not a scenario so compatible with the line of “the hidden laughter / Of children in the foliage” (FQ I, v) or “[t]he unheard music hidden in the shrubbery” (FQ I, i)? Does it not thus also make sense that we must “Quick now, here, now, always—” in order to catch “The voice of the hidden waterfall / And the children in the apple-tree . . . heard, in the stillness / Between two waves of the sea” (FQ III, v)? Therefore, only through such a touch of innocence as pure as children’s could a miracle of this nature occur. Only with such a pure occasion, there would be an opportunity for one to be healed or cured from within as from without. Only with such innocence, the mission impossible could become mission possible. However, even the most sacred soul-cleansing ritual that Parsifal so strictly observes to maintain his innocence or to purify himself before entering the chamber where the Holy Grail was kept by washing his feet in soda water could have become such a pleasurably blasphemous routine for Mrs. Porter and her daughters as the remaining “nymphs” to “wash their feet in soda water” while with “the moon shone bright on” them. Does not the scene thus signify how lower the world has descended prior to any hope for its renewal? THE VERSATILITY OF “I” AND LEGEND, MYTHOLOGY, AND HISTORY PERCEIVED AS PERFORMED Indeed, be it legendary, mythological, or historical, with constant and swift shifting from one allusion to another, the third part, however, often appears so dramatic with abrupt turns and twists that readily switch the narrative from smoothly regular and easy to rime pattern to the irregular nonsensical chanting. Thus with one sporadic rhythmic pattern to another, the poem of The Waste Land through its crucial third part seems to suggest at this point quite performatively how the fire of the desire is not only still burning in various ways but also is flickering and fluttering about to burn out along with everything it burns with. The flame of desire, in other words, is about to extinguish but with its last erratic thrusting and flickering motion in ways so reminiscent of the nymphs who finally departed in rapid succession one after another

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leaving behind them a city cold, deserted, and utterly barren. The nymphs have thus indeed left behind them a city once infamous as a battleground for promiscuous debauchery but now scattered and littered with only the dead bodies as the spoils in abundance for the busily rattling rats. Be it Carthage, Thebes, Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, or London, there is not much difference, if at all. Everything as everywhere has all descended into the utmost despicable scenes of debauchery. Be it Fisher King or Tiresias, neither would there be anyone still remaining unaffected under such a global deterioration of “climate” in terms of the ultimate well-being of humanity as a whole, let alone for anyone even to attempt to turn the tide. The more there is such a thing for one to see, the more affected one would inevitably become, the more one would even be likely to become the part of what one sees. As a result, whatever role that “I” assumes, he would immediately or eventually become or be metamorphosized into the very part of the persons, things, or events he narrates or performs through vivid simulation as a means of his “narration.” Therefore, as the single protagonist-narrator and thus also quite performatively at this point as Fisher King, the “I” remains as hopelessly as he becomes further maimed or emasculated both mentally and psychologically for simply being where he is, with what he sees, and the scene or thing he has to empathize with for the role he plays for the story he tells; he becomes in spite of himself increasingly the part of the dilapidated and deserted landscape of the wasteland, which he once even dreams for its eventual regeneration. In the likewise manner, as Tiresias, the role that “I” also assumes from time to time, he then appears so much affected or metamorphosized by everything he has witnessed. He is, in other words, no longer the wise blind seer as he was once so well known for but becomes instead both physically and mentally a deformed voyeur in the despicable shape of a “struldbrug” with the utmost abominable version of androgyny. His once known vision simply appears so irreversibly transformed or deformed into compulsive voyeurism. He seems to have developed such a peculiar taste for all the utmost morbid and squalid aspects of life after “seeing” all of them so exposed before his very “eyes” one after another for so long. Tiresias could often even become as intimately a part of the conspiracy that he so closely “observes” or gazes upon through his so keenly aroused ever-present voyeurism, be it intended or involuntary. With such subtle and ironical turns and twists in terms of the roles the “I” so performs, both Fisher King and Tiresias often appear so abandoned in ways as they each are. They both often appear, in other words, so deprived not only of their own vital purposes of life but also of their precious souls in the life-depleting environment of the wasteland inasmuch the same way as all the others around them. They would even, each in his own way, become not only the best representatives of all the humanity around them but also the perfect

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perpetrators who would perpetuate such illicit ways of life through their own involuntary agency. They could even so involuntarily perform the role of a trickster so effectively while reporting or narrating whatever activities related with the illicit life in such a way as if the illicit life could thus last forever in ways as if so parodically through “the [same] form, the pattern” that can make everything however dying or dead appear as alive as a Chinese jar standing so impeccably or perpetually in its timely timeless still motion. On the other hand, however badly maimed as he is, Fisher King would still appear as steady as he usually is through the performative agency of “I.” He still remains where he is fishing as loyal to the mission as ever guarding the castle supposedly with the Holy Grail in it although there might not even have been anything left there anymore for him to guard in the first place. He just habitually runs it as his routine, regardless. He virtually in this regard guards the castle in ways as he guards only the lingering echoes that repeat the tree falling sounds in the empty space where the trees used to be.11 So steadily downward is also “I” in the performative role of Tiresias toward further metamorphosis through voyeurism. He is indeed no longer the same Tiresias the wise seer or prophet we are all familiar with especially as the one appearing in Sophocles’s Antigone, but a sneaky voyeur as ignoble as everything he sees around him. Like Fisher King, no longer does Tiresias have the acute mental power in predicting or preventing things from slipping further into the abyss of miseries. Not only mentally but also physically does the once-powerful prophet appear as much deformed in The Waste Land as the worst androgynous types of struldbrugs as Jonathan Swift would himself so admit here. The impact of everything so ignorable that he has been so exposed to for so long apparently yield beyond any credible measure such an irrevocable damage both physically and psychologically on this once famous seer and prophet. If so, what would be the case with all the ordinary souls around him? However, the worst possible scenarios of metamorphosis as so exposed regarding both Fisher King and Tiresias speak best for the I’s perceiving and performative power in acting out the true pictures of the wasteland through the alternative roles of Fisher King and Tiresias he plays so well. Finally, with time so ironically reversed chronologically, the “I” also emerges as both narrator and participant of the merry-making royal excursion on the Thames River, which however turns out as nothing more than a mere parody of the elaborated water music party of celebration that occurs many years later in glorifying King George the First’s rein over England. The parodic excursion for Elizabeth and Leicester, nonetheless, occurs inasmuch the same way as the current images or appearances of Fisher King and Tiresias as merely the parodic phantoms of each’s original version. Therefore, no matter how chronologically the parodic excision should occur so many years ahead of the actual grandiose excursion with “Water Music”

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played on the royal barges for almost all night long, this parodic one in The Waste Land could only appear as the degenerated version of one German composer’s involuntary parodic work of another across space and time in a counterclockwise way. Thus, so contrary to our usual “logical” sense, this counterclockwise occurrence would appear probably further ironical as if it were intended to foreshadow the later (as after), however real as it may appear, as merely the deceptive specter of the former (as before) in ways as the figure of “metalepsis” may so indicate as regards the hidden nature of all the historical occurrences in ways that Nietzsche sees history as the echoes of the surreptitiously reversed cause and effect relationship especially in The Birth of Tragedy. So thus ironically reversed is also the grandeur of “Water Music” that echoes not the elevated joy of ‘Hallelujah” but the mere merrymaking noises of Wagner’s “Weialala” chants. All the noises in rapid shortcut syllables sound like the empty echoes of “the past.” However supposedly the depicted royal water excursion would appear an authentic and original version of a glorious past, the noises of the excursion along with everything about it end up sounding as much meaningless and, all in vain, à la recherche du temps perdu, as the “modern man in search of a soul,” which is no less attainable than the Holy Grail. The noises of all the fake fanfares then quickly become the phantom-like echoes. This is the case regarding how “I “could always emerge as versatile as he is in role-performing Fisher King, Tiresias, anyone or anything as required in the context of The Waste Land. At this moment, observation undoubtedly becomes participation with narrating becoming performing. The process of metamorphosis, therefore, culminates in a parody of “Ode to Joy” in the noises of “Weialala” chants. However versatile as “I” could be in taking shape in the role of Fisher King or Tiresias or taking part in the royal celebration for Elizabeth and Leicester, he could never be anything or anyone other than the worst possible substitute of the original; he could never be a real or original Fisher King or any one of those “Old men [who] ought to be explorers / When here and now cease to matter” (FQ II, v); he would never be so alive with the same urge as “We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity” (FQ II, v) to pursue his mission as with “Love [as] is most nearly [a serious purpose and process] in itself” (FQ II, v); he could only be fishing and musing in the company of “A rat [that] crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimly on the bank.” Indeed, he could only remain as much ghost-like as one of Jonathan Swift’s struldbrugs or Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Tithonus.” Even if he is not so much “etherized Like a patient etherized upon a table” as “When the evening is spread out against the sky,” still, he cannot answer the call such as “Let us go then, you and I,” let alone “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” as Tennyson so indicate. in “Ulysses.”12

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At this point, with his role as the single performative narrator as much effectively performed as a ubiquitous “imposter,” the “I” would even become as fixed in his role as Fisher King with his mission of fishing and guarding the treasure that may not even exist on the piece of land that apparently turns only more and more waste. However, for those not only remaining author’s “mon semblable,—mon frère” but also familiar with the legendary case of Lord Lü Shang呂尚 (ca. 1156 B.C—ca. 1017 B.C), a true historical figure, who stayed so fixed in his dream for an ideal catch and eventually succeeded, would Fisher King here become another case of parody? Indeed, also commonly known as Jiang Ziya (姜子牙), Lord Lü Shang, was not just such a famous fisher; he was literally a brilliant ancient Chinese military strategist and statesman who helped King Wen of Zhou overthrow the brutal Shang dynasty. After King Wu established the Zhou dynasty, Lü Shang was awarded his own piece of land at Qi, which later developed into a powerful state in the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods until the unification of China at the hand of the First Emperor of China. But, first and foremost, he is known for his fishing deliberately with neither a hook nor a bait as an ingenious means to catch the attention of his intended biggest “catch” the King of Wen. Samuel Johnson once defines “a fishing rod” as “a stick with a hook at one end and a fool at the other”; in this case, a fishing rod, however, should be thus defined as a stick with no hook at one end and a brilliant political and military strategist at the other. However, would Lord Lü Shang have, ever, finally obtained the fruitful attention from King Wen, his ultimate ideal catch, if he had not remained as loyal to his plan as Fisher King is with his lost dream? Would his dream have ever come true if he had not, in other words, remained so true with his insane pursuit in ways as much as Don Quixote, who would presumably never have been so accidentally “awakened” to his dreamabandoning and death-accompanying sanity or to his restored “normal” sense of reality from his erratically nonsense-talking but truth-revealing insanity? The perceiving- and performing-I does play his role as ubiquitous and resourceful imposter so well to make it utterly impossible for us as readers or “mon semblable,—mon frère” not to think this way. NARRATING AS PERFORMING INTO THE LIVING ECOLOGIES OF TEXT Therefore, as far as the role-playing issue is concerned, be he as Fisher King, Tiresias, or the lucky participant of the royal river excursion, there is always a surreptitious pattern that accompanies and accounts for how I-Thou relationship would so alternatively turn into I-It or I-Other relationship from time to

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time in parallel with the transformation of the legend into mishap, vision into voyeurism, genuine joyful celebration into farce-making occasion. When the “I” becomes itemized with everything or every scene he sees, he appears as much performatively “otherized,” “metaphorized,” or “objectified” in various ironical senses as the ones he comes in having a relationship with. He could have appeared, as of a mild scenario, to have lost what Emerson calls “a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind,” which could otherwise enable us to restore from within as from without “the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects” for “the charming landscape,” which is, however, so tragically fenced into “property owned by Miller, Locke, or Manning.”13 The perceiving- and performing-I could also become “otherized” the way Lawrence Buell would see it, that is, to have become the part of “nature,” which “has been doubly otherized in modern thought”; he could have become, in other words, “otherized” by or along with “[t]he natural environment [that] as empirical reality has been made to subserve human interests,” that is, with “one of these interests [that] has been to make it serve as a symbolic reinforcement made of the subservience of disempowered groups: nonwhites, women, and children.”14 Even so, the perceiving- and performing“I” as the only single protagonist-narrator could still maintain part of his humanity or human initiative if he does try to “metaphorize,” not simply to let himself be “metamorphosized” into, everything he itemizes in ways as classics indicate, such as The Iliad and The Aeneid. This classical humanityretaining way would appear particularly true as regards how Thoreau does in The Walden trying to give a characteristic human account of everything he observes as human, not instead to let himself be simply so “de-metaphorized” to become deceptively a certain merely indistinguishable part or element of nature. Thoreau’s classical humanity-retaining way is in fact so consistently exemplified in the classics especially in terms of the ways how metaphor and simile are used not to confuse the narrator and the narrated but to characterize each further vividly. Indeed, as Thoreau so exemplifies it, this classical way could be particularly observed in a subtle but vital contrast with the texts by some contemporary natural writers, such as Susan Fenimore Cooper.15 If necessary, the perceiving and performing but always his humanity-retaining single protagonist “I” could certainly even become, for better or worse, as much otherized as “Like a patient etherized upon a table” or as “mon semblable,—mon frère” of each scene’s when he emerges as so involved in all the scenarios that he observes, that is, as if with his own inner mood so intimately empathized or thoroughly identified with everything or everyone he observed. Even so, when “the perceiving-I” could so often become the “performing-I” this way in the context of The Waste Land, he would, however, never, ever, be as otherwise so abetted as regards his own fundamental

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humanity even as such an all-performing and all-simulating narrator under the constantly varying circumstance of such a challenging context the way The Waste Land is regardless of how often he may appear otherwise at the first sight. In this regard, as discussed above in the preface, even the extensive use of function words, such as “the” in the text, would not ever occasion the problem of dehumanization or the detrimental impact on our language in ways that so concern scholars and critics, such as G. Rostrevor Hamilton. They were all noted for their criticism of the so-called tendency of overusing the definite article by contemporary poets, such as Auden and Eliot. This tendency, as Hamilton saw it, by means of unnecessarily elevating the noun groups, not only undermines “the native energy of the verb” but also, as a result, causes damages to “the structure of the English language” to such a degree as to push further the antihumanist trend common to modern writers.16 On the contrary, this scenario as the critics were so concerned about would probably instead further strengthen or substantiate the humanity-retaining narrative power so observed of the perceiving and performing single protagonist narrator particularly through, quite ironically, the so-called antihumanist tension as inherent in language with the function words so used or “abused” in ways that concern these critics as above. The problem that so concerned these critics, however, does not at all appear ever materialized as predicted, at least in the context of The Waste Land, thanks to the invoked metaphorical power inherent in language, particularly in the often too trivial to be noticeable function words. When the function words are used extensively together, for instance, as concentrated as an intimate meaning-making network or a close-knitted fluid verbal strings, they seem to become the “invisible hand” so unique only of humanity to allow the poem to flow so naturally from inside out with overflowing human emotion. The self-abetting scenarios, therefore, once again, as Theodor Adorno would possibly so explain here, result largely from the live process of thinking and observing when “the author’s impulses are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp” and “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”17 Does not this observation could also mean how there would always be something substantial or substantive “to be interpreted out of a work” even if everything may so often appear as if merely “interpreted into it”? Indeed, however, even with the authorial “impulses” that may appear so “extinguished” or “otherized” into each and everything it has itemized, the humanity of the “perceiving-I” turned “performing-I” would still often remain so serendipitously further substantiated or “metaphorized” through the process of itemization. The process would thus quite ironically further indicate how performatively the perceiving-I’s acutely all-grasping and actively all-participating perception could be as potentially inexhaustible as

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everlasting as with the scenes that he so insatiably observes. This phenomenon could be particularly observed especially in terms of the suggestive argument as Rochelle Johnson provides regarding the radical difference between Thoreau’s and [Susan Fenimore] Cooper’s description of their narrative selves. For Johnson, each of their narratives definitely offers a quick and telling look at their distinctive narrative postures and methods. Clearly, any place-based nature writing, such as Cooper’s, offers to some degree an anthropocentric view of its subject simply because a writer brings a human perspective to the project; yet Thoreau’s celebration of his “brag[ging] as lustily as Chanticleer in the morning . . . if only to wake my neighbors up” seems markedly more self-assured and self-centered than Cooper’s description of herself sans metaphor, as a “rustic bird-fancier” who has completed a “simple record” “trifling observation” on “the seasons in rural life.”18 Therefore, regardless of all possible scenarios of him being “otherized” or “etherized” as he goes through the process of being itemized, the perceivingand performing-“I” still maintain his “self” even if he would so inevitably remain or has become the part of bleak scene of the wasteland with everything that he so encounters and accounts of; he would probably still maintain, in other words, his irreducible humanity regardless of his deft all-adaptable human agency; he always thus maintains his humanity and his human initiative even if so often when he would appear also as much deprived or depleted of anything suggestive of hope and inextinguishable and irreducible human initiative as the wasteland he so faithfully depicts by means of his thorough engagement with or transformation into it. This particular instance as regards how the perceiving-I could still maintain his “self,” however much “otherized” or “etherized” as he is, could indeed be further understood, as mentioned in the preface, in terms of what Maria Rainer Rilke reveals through the panther of his eponymous poem. The poem describes how the persona nonchalantly maintains himself as a detached observer while so empathetically transforming himself into the panther that “paces in cramped circles, over and over / the movement of his powerful soft strides / is like a ritual dance around the center / in which a might will stands paralyzed.”19 Likewise, as indicated in the live context of The Waste Land, the “perceiving-I” as such a nameless chameleon-like single-protagonist so inherent in the scene of the wasteland as described would certainly often, not without a subtle sense of irony, transform himself, quite so performatively, from a detached observer into the very center of the action that he observes. If the persona of Rilke’s poem would become, in other words, so performatively or empathetically the panther he observes while maintaining himself as the detached observer at the same time, so would be exactly the case with the perceiving- and performing-I in The Waste Land. This scenario could even be made further sense of through a poem titled “Fish-Eye View” by Jay Parini,

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which describes a process of metamorphosis, self-alienation, dehumanization in whatever Ovidian or Kafkaesque sense, or even of a scene of compatible with Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” but with a special kind of Emersonian mind-penetrating “mildness.” With its acute sense of humor, the poem describes through the performative narration, how “Not everyone so lucky / Long before the world drew up its shades / we gathered at the table, trembling, / and drew lots” and how consequently “A friend of mine, / who washed his hands before and after / every single meal, became an earthworm” whereas another “One, a teller of white lies, / now swings his guts, / in some damp forest, limb to limb, / spinning his web ,,, looking for / a fly who was my neighbor / in the mist before: always annoying / with his busy drone in my good ear.” The poem then describes how the rest fares, for better or worse, in their next round of cycle as “reincarnated” creatures. While “That guy who hit on anything in skirts / is baying at the moon, far from the pack, / lost in the howl of his desire,” here comes out “One girl who favored woolen sweaters / has become a moth in her own closet.” The persona himself, however, appears, quite fortunately, in a better shape, as in his own words, because “Not so bad, / with easy money all around me, / and gilded life for me to spend” as he is now just “sitting pretty in Des Moines, / in this bright mall, one of a tank / of ritzy goldfish.”20 So, in this case, while everyone else has become so metamorphosized into various kinds of the unpleasant forms of life, the perceiving-I becomes comfortably a gold fish in a fish tank at a shopping mall reviewing a gilded world all-around outside through the tank in ways as what happens in Natsume Sōseki’s I am a Cat. The scenario thus means that the perceiving-I still maintains his human consciousness as much as Gregor Samsa, even of a further intense kind, due to his so “otherized” state of being. The scenario could certainly also be interpreted as how the speaker may just sit in leisure outside next to the tank but imagine at the same time everything around and beyond so intensely through the “fish-eye view” in ways as the title of poem so suggests.21 Indeed, be he as Fisher King or Tiresias, while performing his role, the “perceiving-I” turned “performing-I” as the single protagonist-narrator often consequently seems to be at once in control of and in the control of everything he narrates; he often emerges, in other words, as if whirling a Sufi dervish dance in such a way that it would thus strike as neither necessary nor possible to tell apart the dancer from his dance. Like the dervish dancer, the perceiving- and performing-I would so often become so out of himself to be one with or simply as the Other, be it possibly the prophet or even the divine being, per se. The scenario is thus in fact not so hard to comprehend if also with money as an analogy. While money could certainly represent power, it would also often simply become the power itself when used in a certain

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way and to a certain degree. Indeed, if function words, such as “the” could often appear as alive as any literary character in the actual context when they appear so used in ways as if “not merely being referred to [. . . but] are being converted—by the very grammar—into things, entities, [as to even become] as substantial as any [literary] character” or to simply acquire the power of “almost ‘a sort of personification,”22 so would the persona as the perceivingI turned performing-I. This phenomenon of “role-transformation” would certainly be further observed as occurring hand in hand with verbal transformation in the live context of The Waste Land. If Konstantin Stanislavski’s performing theory could be duly summed up here to emphasize how one should “forget oneself” to become the character one performs, this phenomenon of role-transformation does occur with the at once perceiving- and performing-I, regardless of whether he is in the form of Fisher King, Tiresias, or the participant of the royal merry-making excursion. In the live context of The Waste Land at this point, Tiresias, for instance, does not only see but also so often becomes the one he sees or simply everything or every scene he sees; blind, old as he is with “ wrinkled dugs,” Tiresias, in other words, appears so integrated into everything or every scene he sees in such a way he not just “perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—” but anxiously “too awaited the expected guest” or the “clients” the typist brings home, such as the sailors from the sea. The “perceiving-I” could thus become, not just Fisher King and Tiresias but the sailors-receiving typist as one of such few nymphs remaining behind after all those who departed; he could even personify or simply become in this capacity the lingering fire of lust, which is still burning in the unreal city but is about to burn out. The “perceiving-I” would often thus emerge so performatively alive with its ubiquitous presence through everything it itemizes. Therefore, the at once perceiving- and performing-I could thus still appear present through each itemized or personified “the” when he is so literally absent; he would even appear, in other words, so “absently present” or “presently absent” in the actual context particularly when the text is timely mediated through the ever-present and fully motivated frequent agency of function words, such as “the”; he would indeed thus even become another version of Dorian Gray in the picture and in the real-life that enliven and burn out each other as “You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!” As a result, however likely as vision may thus degenerate into voyeurism in ways as much as legendary heroism would become ignoble part of mundane life in the wasteland, this third part, quite contrary to its title as “The Fire Sermon,” thus appears to suggest rather ironically a scene short of fire. With the remaining fire all about to become extinguished, everything also appears to be so burned up and out to be thoroughly cleared of the wasteland for another cycle of life; everything would be, in other words, so cleared of for

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the life-renewing virtues of “restraint,” “discipline,” and compassion “ to sound clear and loud as one would hear soon from a singing harbinger in the dry and empty thunderclaps that brings no immediate raindrops but delivers the raindrops of hope as from the divine text of the Upanishads. The sound of “Da, Da, Da” would therefore sound like the melody of “Ode to the West Wind” inherent in the primitive wisdom-conveying “intermediary sensation” of Sanskrit as the familiar Indo-European foreign tongue would so deliver in ways as Herder would so suggest. NARRATING AS PERFORMING FOR “THE SWEETER, UNHEARD MELODY” HIDDEN IN WORDS However, as indicated above, especially with reference to the hidden personifying power or agency of function words, such as of “the,” the performative power of the narrative does not simply result from “the author’s impulses [that] are extinguished in the objective substance they grasp,” nor does the authorial “impulses” even appear in any way so readily “extinguishable” into each and everything it has itemized. The humanity of the perceiving- and performing-I could instead even become so serendipitously further substantiated alive in the text, with the text, and through text, from one text to another, no matter how likely “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it.”23 Therefore, as the scenarios thus indicate, whether as perceiving-I or his “mon frère,” there is no way that one could completely “forget oneself”; instead, one would be constantly reminded of how to be oneself in order to cultivate oneself for a better self in ways as Bertolt Brecht may so suggest, if life itself could be so understood as the actual stage of ongoing “epic theater.” We must, in other words, maintain a critical distance, as Brecht so indicates, from what occurs on the stage whether we are in the role of audience or actor because life could indeed be a tragedy for those who feel and a comedy for those who think as Dante and Balzac both know so well as the authors of the Divine Comedy and the Human Comedy. With The Waste Land, however, the indispensable critical self-awareness does not necessarily result mainly from the effort of perceiving-I, nor does it depend solely upon the audience but from the text itself, which constantly reminds oneself of how one actually “thinks in fragments just as reality [of text] is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over”24; it is particularly the case especially with regard to the fragments of allusions in the text of The Waste Land as if they were all so indiscriminately jumbled together from such widely discrete sources, let alone those quoted directly from the original texts of the other

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tongues, only for the very purpose to make it utterly impossible for us to “forget ourselves” but instead to make it so easy for us to remind ourselves constantly of our critical roles as readers. Indeed, if Konstantin Stanislavski’s theatrical performance theory, just for the convenience of comparison, could be simplified as a “forgetting yourself” approach whereas Bertolt Brecht’s could be identified in contrast as a “remembering yourself” method, the text of The Waste Land supports both. The former certainly emphasizes the necessity for the audience to stay emotionally or empathetically engaged with the performance for the maximum theatrical experience by means of identifying themselves as much as possible with or simply transforming themselves into the story on the stage, while the latter emphasizes the importance of maintaining a self-conscious critical distance from what occurs on the stage. As indicated by the beginning scene as quoted above, the text of The Waste Land would often so easily make us forget ourselves with scenes that appear so present, realistic, and familiar to us, whereas, at the same time, the familiar scene could also quickly turn out as being so strange or “weird” to make it simply impossible for us to forget ourselves. How could we, for instance, forget ourselves, ever, when everything so familiar, such as the reference to April as “the cruelest” month in the first section, the nightingale in the second, and the shining moon in this section, could also instantly appear as if so familiarly strange in distance in ways as if only possible from the utmost remote past and even somewhat so suggestive of an alienated life of ourselves as our own ghost-like “mon frère” in a world far, far beyond? Would it not be the likewise scenario for the perceiving and performing only protagonist-narrator to make the audience stay engaged or simply become so mesmerized through what he performs by means of “forgetting himself” but at the same time to try to maintain the indispensable critical awareness that he must make audience maintain as audience, first and foremost, by the means of “remembering himself” in terms of what he is acting or criticizing by means of acting; he must, in other words, even act in this way as a critical means to remind not only of himself but also of his audience that he is acting as a critic of the very life phenomena that he is acting upon. Otherwise, as it really occurred in actual reality, what would it be of any educational, aesthetic, or even the cathartic value as regards such performance as artwork when one of the audience could become so moved, mesmerized, or utterly confused that he attempted to shoot the actor on the spot simply because he took him as the real villain whom the actor acted so well on the stage? Undoubtedly, all the scenes in the live context of The Waste Land could all appear, so often, so familiarly unfamiliar in such a way as relatable even with such an anecdote of bisection of humanity as Plato so mentions in

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“Symposium” regarding humanity’s former gods-challenging whole power or whole “self” becoming so bisected following its clamorous Zeus-defying arrogance and deeds. Indeed, in The Waste Land, from time to time, there could be, as in the third part, such gods-disturbing “blasphemous” scenes and noises, such as “the sound of horns and motors” that bring clients or guests to Mrs. Porter and Mrs. Porter and her daughter washing their feet in soda water under the same moonlights that used to shine on Parsifal when washed his feet as part of his pious Grail-guarding duty and ritual along with children’s pure singing voice in the couple, which, however, could also often appear so mixed up with Philomel’s “twit twit” and “jug jug sounding “inviolable voice.” Indeed, from “the sound of horns and motors” to children’s chanting in the copula, everything, for instance, would probably occur as if just as abruptly but as significantly as the change of one familiar musical key in English to another less familiar one in French. To capture the significance of the modulation certainly requires adequate sense and sensibility especially when everything would even be so swiftly switched back and forth into such bizarre sounds of onomatopoeia as the sad recurring leitmotif of Philomel’s “[s]o rudely forc’d” metamorphosis. The modulated leitmotif of such sad metamorphoses would sometimes even become echoes as real, authentic, and yet as ungraspable as the elusive children’s laughter echoing so deep in the foliage between and beyond the limited view that we still stay so caught with in seeing the world as simple unbeing and being. Likewise, from the clients-bringing sound of horns and motors that the “perceiving-I” so confirms as “I hear” in The Waste Land, there would also be “The mind-forged manacles [that William Blake declares as] I hear” as if so echoing “In every cry of every man, / In every infant’s cry of fear, / In every voice, in every ban” along with “the hapless soldier’s sigh / Runs in blood down palace walls.” The perceiving-I hears them all in London as the Unreal City in The Waste Land as much as Blake hears it in London as the real city as the perceiving-I’s predestined or reincarnated “mon semblable,—mon frère.” With key shifting or modulating in this way, we would therefore never be allowed to forget ourselves, nor would it even be ever possible for us to forget ourselves because there is at least the very text, which requires so much of our own initiative, courage, and even a “knack” simply to be able to make through it. The text could be so often like a desert, to borrow words from Levinas, because there is no steady and familiar landmark for us to grapple with due to the constantly shifting landscape. This way of handling the text as an orphan or as upon the desert, however, does “mean nothing occult or metaphysic,” as Stephen Toulmin might also comment here as he recalled his learning experience in a class he took from Wittgenstein and from reading Zhuangzi about Cook Ding. For Toulmin, just like the “knack” that Wittgenstein referred to regarding a geologist’s skillful field experience in

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making instant right decision, Cook Ding’s “great knowledge is not perception that measures and categorizes” but his acute mind that “tries to use what cannot be measured in an entirely practical way”25; nor does the “knack” or “great knowledge necessarily suggest anything like “a magic eye able to penetrate something ordinary minds cannot apprehend” but only something hard to describe but is truly working, “something perfectly ordinary, empirical, and quasi-aesthetic in the way it works” as “it is the same with doctors and sailors: some cases do not ‘smell right.’”26 This special fully contextualized, reader’s personal initiative-demanding and highly pragmatic phenomenon of intertextuality, however, always remains explainable not only from modernist or postmodernist points of view but also from the classical ones, such as the one explored by Erick Auerbach in Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. While talking about the significance of analyzing “Odysseus’ scar,” Auerbach argues how Western narrative culture is influenced by both Homeric and Hebraic narrative tradition. The Homeric tradition reveals special “intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactic culture,” which tends to “fully externalize description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression”;27 it tends to display, in other words, “all events in the full ground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective.”28 This narrative tradition is not only inclined to “bewitch the sense”29 but also tends to deliver the narrative often in such distinctive ways, which “are yet comparatively simple in their picture of human beings; and no less so in their relation to the real life.”30 As a matter of fact, a depiction of “the real-life” as “in general delight in physical existence,” as Auerbach so emphasizes, “is everything to [the authors in the tradition], and their highest aim is to make that delight perceptible to us.”31 Behind and beneath it, often in contrasting parallel with the orderly Homeric narrative culture, there is, however, also the Hebraic tradition. At this point, the narrative focus would not turn out as much upon the integrity of the “intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactic culture” as upon the ultimate intimacy of its “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena,”32 and, at the same time, these phenomena must be revealed with “certain parts brought into high relief, [while with] others left obscure.”33 This part of the narrative tradition is therefore characteristic of “abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings and need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.”34 These mixed traditions apparently sustain the Western narrative culture because the narrative could then “bewitch senses” or “produce lively sensory effects” for the “moral, religious, and psychological phenomena” to be possibly “made concrete in the sensible matter of life.”35 This is indeed the narrative tradition

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that would, in other words, so surreptitiously and often serendipitously keep us so busily shifting back and forth from the mode and mood of “forgetting ourselves” to the mode and mood of “remembering ourselves” through the constantly or even simultaneously sense-bewitching and mind-bewildering meaningful key modulation. As an utterly inseparable pair, these two traditions sustain The Waste Land as much as Four Quartets, if not more so, especially in terms of the former’s “fragmented” text in addition to innumerous allusions and its instantly reversible realistic and surrealist modes of narrative; these instantly reversible narrative modes are so far beyond any spatiotemporal boundary especially in terms of the sublime power of the timely timeless time, which they so often perspicuously set in display with the text. This sublime power of time so revealed through the instantly reversible narrative modes often emerges as much effectively in the context of The Waste Land as in that of Four Quartets as if so immaculately compatible with “the sublime influence of God [as revealed in the Hebraic tradition] that reaches so deeply into the everyday that the two realms of the sublime and every day are not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.”36 In exactly the same way, “the two realms of the sublime and everyday” in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets indeed appear “not only actually unseparated but basically inseparable.”37 As a result, the sublime narrative power of the two realms would certainly appear or remain so inseparable not only in terms of our everyday activities but also in terms of our daily mind work. because it penetrates so deep not just in every single word we use but in every single occasion we use it, including all otherwise so “meaningless” or often simply too trivial to be noticeable function words and phonemes. Consequently, a simple word or a “flat commonplace” one, such as a “trivial” function word “the” or “and,” would make us not only so timely pick up “the sweeter, unheard melody” of time or the unheard music hidden in the shrubbery like children’s hidden laughter echoing deep in the foliage in ways so much about “inner freedom” of us all (FQ I, ii) but also feel in it the forever timeless sublime power of time. In all these seemingly too trivial to be meaningful or even noticeable function words or phonemes, there is so sublimely the music heard so deeply from within our heart and soul, as Eliot suggests, would often appear as the music unheard or utterly inaudible from without. Therefore, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, what we would possibly pick up in this regard could be the most sublime music of void and silence, which, in its God-like, ever-present timely timeless power, would have as much impact on our conscious as upon our unconscious from behind our “intellectual, linguistic, and above all syntactic culture.” This scenario would, for instance, so routinely occurs in The Waste Land from behind, between, or even beyond the gray areas of any normal circumstances in such a way as if “I was neither /

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Living nor dead” and “I knew nothing” else but “silence” as the only “heart of light” to look into; it literally so routinely occurs inasmuch the same way as in Four Quartets as if with everything still staying as constantly caught as we are in our limited view of this complex world of ours still as much so arbitrarily divided as between simple “un-being and being.” Therefore, the commonplace words in the context of The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, especially those too trivial to be often readily noticeable function words, such as “and” and “the,” would appear so instrumental in sustaining and bewitching our senses until they switch us once again, as if always so abruptly, to the brutal reality emerging from behind the scenes. We would be thus, in other words, instantly brought back to the brutally disrupted reality that forever remains hidden behind, beneath, and between the orderly fabricated facades of “syntactic culture” or the intricate tapestry of the text so immaculately stitched up through the impeccable needlework of the commonplace function words. The Western narrative tradition could then, indeed as Auerbach so argues, be certainly understood as made of these two at once conflicting and complementary major components in every possible aspect even in ways through the pivotal mediation or modulation of those most fluently repeated function words. The success or failure of any narrative, such as the case with both The Waste Land and Four Quartets, would be therefore so much contingent upon the crucial and creative balance between the two parts, which literally means, once again, through the vital and subtle balance of the verbal text by means of the indispensable mediation or agency of function words. The balance is so crucial for us to achieve the desired aesthetic integrity of the Homeric part of tradition and, also, as expected, the timely revelation of the deep reality through the Hebraic part of tradition. This reality, however, could be so simultaneously real and surreal, but always remains “invisible” or occasionally “enlightened” by the immeasurably vast territory of a void as utterly unknown, intangible but forever present; it remains, in other words, the irreplaceable life-granting and meaning-suggesting matrix of void that sustains our neatly worded world or verbal reality from behind the scenes as “space,” “room,” “leeway,” or as any visible or invisible fissure, cleft, chasm underneath “a heap of broken images” or a piece of rock, out of which a “stony rubbish” may grow, or as a barely visible truth-revealing crack on an otherwise impeccable “gold bowl.” Indeed, it is only from beneath, behind, and between these constantly alternating modes of being and unbeing, order and chaos, substantive void and allusive substance that we could often hear the tenacious message of hope so often mixed in the sweeter, unheard laughter of children or voix d’enfants along with the forever lingering echoes of nightingale’s heart-touching and soul-etherizing melody.

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“THE SWEETER, UNHEARD MELODY” ECHOING ALIVE IN THE FOREIGN TONGUES As will be further discussed in detail in chapter 5, the textual reality would not ever allow one to forget oneself for “the sweeter, unheard melody,” which often appear echoing alive in foreign languages particularly in The Waste Land as if everything is so designed as a special measure to prevent one from forgetting oneself. These foreign tongues seem to keep us all awake or alive with our insatiable curiosity still wandering around with wonder for the best yet to come. In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, C. G. Jung recounts his experience in Africa, where “generally,” he observes, “it is one of the cleverest and shrewdest men of the tribes who is entrusted with the observation of events” because “his knowledge must suffice to explain all unusual occurrences, and his art to combat them.”38 Such a person, as Jung further observes, is highly respected as “the scholar, the specialist, the expert on the subject of chance occurrences, and the same time the keeper of achieves of the tribe’s traditional lore.”39 But, although he is thus “surrounded by respect and fear” and “enjoys great authority,” his tribe is still “secretly convinced that their neighbors have a sorcerer who is stronger than theirs,” because they believe that “the best medicine is never to be found close at hand, but as far away as possible.”40 As a result, “[the] old medicine-man [held] in the greatest awe” in the tribes, such as the one that Jung comments on, “was consulted only for the minor ailments of cattle and men” and “in all serious cases a foreign authority was called in—a M’ganga (sorcerer) who was brought at a high price from Uganda.”41 Probably not just a coincidence, the Chinese would not find this experience incomprehensible. In the Chinese language, there are many idioms that literally suggest a similar conviction and approach regarding the actual and / or potential national attitude and aptitude, such as “The stone from the mountain afar could be used in making good jade (ta shan zi shi, ke yi gong yu 他山之石, 可以攻玉 )” or, in a more colloquial term, “The monk from the farthest land prays best (yuan lai de he shang hao nian jing 遠來的和尚好唸經).” The Chinese thus do believe that the monks from the farthest land pray best, but only when the monks can be creatively employed to legitimize or to negotiate for authoritative power—whether covertly or overtly. What is really important then is which “monk” is chosen to pray and what “scripture” (jing) is authorized for the purpose and process. What matters even more, as far as The Waste Land is concerned, is whether or how significantly the way that the monk prays may have been changed at once self-consciously or involuntarily under the influences of the host culture or text that it is invited to pray for in the first place.42 Regardless, in the actual context of The Waste Land, it is indeed these “Weialala leia Wallala leialala” sounds from Richard Wagner across the

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continent for the occasion of the royal excursion on Thames would certainly have its special irreplaceable impact; it would, for instance, so timely remind us of how ridiculous this excursion could possibly be as the noisy merry-making parody of the real days-long royal water celebration parades on the Thames for King George the First, which even occasioned George Frideric Handel’s immortal masterpiece of “Water Music.” Undoubtedly, these merry-making noises often sound as if merely so forcefully or artificially inserted or in ways as still “so rudely forced” upon all the “dirty tears” as upon all the innocent souls with the nightingale’s sad “inviolate voice,” which still “filled all the desert” as it is still “told upon the walls” with all the “other withered stumps of time,” such as “the hapless Soldiers sigh / [that] Runs in blood down Palace walls.” At the same time, it would however equally remind us of how ironically least expected these parodic merry-making noises would be as the real hopeful sounds of “harbingers” in the context of The Waste Land especially in terms of the divine message delivered from the Upanishads through the thunderclaps in culminating choruses in the foreign tongues. Indeed, these current parodic merry-making noises are there in this way significantly substituting for the time being in the most fitting role of clowns or buffoons for the eventual arrival of the triumphant sounds of “the dry sterile thunder” as the hidden divine message from the Upanishads. Would not the sound of “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih ” then consequently sound like a special piece of “The Ode to the West Wind”? How “when the winter comes can spring be far behind?” Do not the nonsensically sounding parodic merry-making noises in the foreign tongue, in other words, signal, as ironically the most suitable tunes from across lands and seas as across “even [the patient] silence in the mountains” (WL V, ii)? These foreign words indeed keep the textual reality such a deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, from which the meanings sprout inexhaustibly for those who know how to explore and dig. Would not these lines quoted so directly from the original foreign tongues, at the same time, keep us from being buried or drowned alive as we would often become so hallucinated or mesmerized in the flows of so many and so familiar sounding words? Would not the flows of the familiar words, in other words, so easily, as Baudelaire so puts it, “swallow all creation in a yawn” in ways of “Ennui! Moist-eyed perforce, worse than all other” as the vices for the readers as reliable “mon semblable,—mon frère”? Would not the unfamiliar sounds of the foreign words themselves even become the live allusions to us in ways as they would so timely or fruitfully estrange ourselves from the text when it becomes too dubiously familiar or too readily meaningful to become meaningless? Would not these parodic merry-making noises, like all other allusions in foreign tongues, effectively remind us not to be so off guard as to become so otherwise “extinguished”

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into the text even if however inevitably “nothing can be interpreted out of a work without at the same time being interpreted into it”?43 Regardless, in short, these lines from the original foreign tongues would certainly remind us from time to time how not to forget ourselves; they would certainly thus remind us of how not only to remember ourselves but also to maintain ourselves as much as possible especially with regard to our critical awareness and self-integrity as readers. This is exactly what we must do as readers no matter how we must also flow with the verbal flows or currents as ones who actually “thinks in fragments just as reality [of text] is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over.”44 In this regard, The Waste Land appears particularly effective in terms of its use of allusions from the original foreign tongues, which would so timely rip open or disrupt any otherwise too artificially steady readerly flow of reading on the surface to make it possible for truly and necessarily meaningful writerly reading process in depth; it would be particularly effective, in other words, in switching us constantly or timely back and forth from a sensebewitching Homeric mode to a mind-bewildering Hebraic mode. Again, in this regard, Eliot apparently knows, how monks from afar not only pray best but also pray best in their own original tongues because they carry or contain, as Gottfried von Herder would also so likely emphasize here, the “primitive wisdom”-reviving and reflecting “intermediary sensation,” which would be nonetheless all lost in translation; it is therefore through this irreplaceable “intermediary sensation” that the “primitive wisdom” would be kept alive; it would be kept alive as much through such purely nonsensical but meaningfully performative nursey rhythm of falling London Bridge as effectively through “ces voix d’enfants,” in the copula which would constantly reminds us not only of the chastity of Parsifal’s but also of the unperishable hope he personifies. In ways as the nursery rhythm on London Bridge so indicates in English, the tenacious message of hope would remain as much alive in French as it is so personified by Parsifal’s legendarily foolish integrity and innocence; it would echo as much alive in children’s singing voices in the cupola or in the garden along with the hidden laughter in the foliage or in the shrubbery; it would echo as much alive, in short, as the children’s singing voice in the garden that led St. Augustine to his eventual conversion to his Christian faith with serendipitous “leap of faith.” Often kept so intact in foreign tongues as in our native language upon variable circumstances, the tenacious message of hope would indeed be possibly detected as alive as in “the form, the pattern” of Dao or yinyang, which, as so ubiquitously “the pattern of timing,” would keep everything still move like a Chinese jar in its perpetual mode of motionless motion to be so reflective of the timely timeless mood of time; it would keep everything so alive, so surreptitiously

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as well as so serendipitously alive from beneath and behind the ever-present and everlasting void as if in the no-man’s zone between unbeing and being so immeasurably “beyond good and evil” or beyond any fixed usual mindmanacling or idea-transfixing ready-made measures. Undoubtedly, as will be discussed further in chapter 5, this particular phenomenon of Eliot’s predilection in using as many sources as directly from various other cultures and languages speaks quite prolifically for his spiritual need to draw as many elements of nutrition from as many different cultures as from the inexhaustibly interpenetrated living ecologies in ways as much significantly reflected in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. With Eliot, it is certainly true that “[w]hen there is distress of nations and perplexity,” be it “on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road,” we are aroused with “men’s curiosity [that] searches past and future” for a pivotal moment or “point of intersection of the timeless / With time” (FQ III, v). Indeed, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, this spiritual journey certainly leads Eliot from one venture to another roaming around in intellectual circles, often frustrated with “an exhilarating sense of isolation” but, at the same time, the journey becomes increasingly enriched for Eliot with “Both Christianity and the lessons of the ‘great literature of Asia’”45; it becomes increasingly enriched, in other words, with the elixir from both “The ‘shores of Asia and the Edgware Road’ [which] are brought together as they had been brought together to The Waste Land.”46 The journey of Eliot’s involuntary mission of self-prophecy is enriched, for instance, as much with such crucial terms as they appear in the context of “The Dry Salvages,” that is, “Annunciation” and “Incarnation” of “Eliot’s mature Christian prayer for its lyric,” as with “what he had learned as a young man from his reading of Indian poetry of the test of ‘right action.’”47 In this regard, the particular journey that so remarkably culminates in Four Quartets, in other words, largely takes shape in The Waste Land. Eliot, as Paul Kramer points out, “was attracted to the many ways in which the Absolute found expression in Western and Indic cultures”48; he actually “was fascinated by how their differences were significant for one another.”49 “Recognizing the wide variety of approaches that one can take to different religions,” Eliot, as Kramer further points out, noted in the preface he wrote to Thoughts for Meditation that “while some readers, especially Christians, may regard Asian scriptures as occult and therefore untrue, it is critical to learn ‘how frequently contemplatives of religions and civilization remote from each other are saying the same thing.’”50 However, “the same thing,” for Eliot, emphasizes Kramer, “refers not to doctrinal or theological constructs but to what Eliot saw as the true spirit of religious life, the mature contemplative attitude, which bears at the heart of all major forms of spirituality.”51 Therefore, “without this shared value,” it is as clear to Kramer as to Eliot,

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“religious practice devolves into sectarian disagreements over inflexible dogmatic beliefs.”52 Whenever Eliot comes out with such a line as “And all is always now,” this is also the moment that Eliot, as Thomas Howard suggests, is “beginning to sound suspiciously Buddhist or Taoist or perhaps Hindu” and it is clear to Howard that “certainly Eliot had done his homework in Oriental religion.”53 If so, would not the first step of this wonderful spiritual journey be clearly traced back to the very text of The Waste Land? CONCLUSION: HOPE IN DESPAIR Even if the message of hope is so surreptitiously inherent in The Waste Land, it is, however, still not so fully or serendipitously revealed in the “masterpiece of despair” until the last part. Even so, the message of hope has nonetheless already been subtly conveyed from behind, beneath, and between almost every scene of debauchery and through every possibly expressed sense of despair. Where is hope then? Hope is in the hopelessness and helplessness as much as Dao would be possibly found from places where it deems least likely, such as “piss and shit,” as Zhuangzi so suggests in the eponymous masterpiece of Daoism. As previously discussed, hope is there even in “the cruelest month” of April, which would so readily bring the lilacs-breeding power to the wasteland or the luscious life to the “dead land” from underneath rocks, stony rubbish, and even the corpse buried underneath the dirt of garden; it is undoubtedly also here with the maimed or emasculated Fisher King because when we know the legend of Fisher King how could it be possible for us not also to know of Parsifal, the “pure fool,” as Fisher King’s loyal successor, who would bring hope to the wasteland? Does Parsifal not personify the hope especially in terms of his unparalleled discipline and determination in resisting all lusts and desires so that he can drink from the Holy Grail? Is he not the one who personifies, in other words, the virtue of “restraint, discipline, and compassion,” which are so indispensable for anyone who is endowed with the noble mission to guard the Holy Grail as it is so insisted in the Upanishads as echoing in sounds of “da, da, da” of “the dry sterile thunder”? Indeed, Parsifal personifies hope through Fisher King in the context of The Waste Land however much he could be so unparallel as virtuous as such a “pure fool” or “idiot” as Prince Myshkin in Dostoevsky’s eponymous novel The Idiot, of which Jesus, as Nietzsche presumably saw him, becomes the archetypical figure inasmuch the same way as Parsifal is. Is he not also as a “pure fool” as Alyosha Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov? Indeed, how could it be possible for us to know about Fisher King without also knowing about Parsifal inasmuch the same way as knowing Gilgamesh

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without knowing Enkidu, his goddess-sent-companion? If Enkidu humbles Gilgamesh to know about his own human mortality, Gilgamesh humanizes Enkidu by making him “wise and week” with the two eventually becoming each other’s “mon semblable,—mon frère!” If Parsifal could be so taken as the archetypical character who personifies hope, would it still be possible for us to miss the message of hope even when we encounter such ignoble scenes as the blind but all-perceiving Tiresias would lead us to see? When we follow Tiresias to see how Mrs. Porter and her daughter “wash their feet in soda water,” would we not believe there would be sooner or later emerging in the future as in the past another such a determined and disciplined wasteland-rejuvenating “pure fool” as Parsifal, who would not enter the castle where the holy grail is kept without purifying himself first in the ritual of washing his feet in the soda water? Likewise, would it be equally possible for us not to see any sign of hope in this last line quoted in French original from Paul Verlaine’s poem on Parsifal not only because of all we know of Parsifal but also because of the special meaning of children’s voice? Indeed, the message of hope is always there in one way or another in children’s voices; it is not only here in the context of The Waste Land but also there in the context of Four Quartets, in which the voices culminate as the ever-lingering echoes of hope and triumph with such a conviction upon “A condition of complete simplicity . . . When the tongues of flames are in-folded / Into the crowned knot of fire / And the fire and the rose are one” (FQ IV, v). Undoubtedly, as thus meaningfully indicated in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets as regards our understanding of the message of hope in the worded world as in the real world, there might be as much normal or regular “common sensical” differentiation to remain so stuck or embroiled with our limited view of the complex world as nothing more than a simple state of being neatly divided or readily divisible between simple unbeing and being as there is always also a sudden mind-refreshing revelation that “rises with children’s laughter echoing in the foliage, which would emerge so quickly or so all of a “Sudden in a shaft of sunlight / Even while the dust moves” (FQ I, v). For such a revelation of laughter, we therefore must also be as “quick now, here, now” as to catch with the quickly floating, fleeing, and fleeting moment or momentum of life as between great wave of time. Once again, this message of hope is, indeed, equally there in the form of a sudden revelation that occasions St. Augustine’s ultimate conversion to Christianity after a difficult period of lapse through the mediation of children’s voices as it so occurs to him in ways as he accounts in his autobiographic account Confessions of St. Augustine. Indeed, would this incident not occur in ways so compatible with “children’s hidden laughter in the foliage” in Four Quartets? So consistent with the third part titled as “The Fire Sermon,” the message of hope

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becomes fully revealed in the last part particularly with the line from Dante’s Purgatory, “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” as a conclusive additional reference to Fire Sermon. The hope, therefore, is indeed there with the fire that would burn out as much of itself as of everything that it burns and everything burns with, be it the inseverable attachment to life or the indispensable condition that occasions the fire. The fire would burn as much in ways as the line that concludes this part so indicates “la la / To Carthage then I came / Burning burning burning burning.” The fire thus “burns” inasmuch the same way it burns here in the text of The Waste Land as in the text of “Fire Sermon,” that is, “The eye is burning, forms are burning, eye-consciousness is burning, eye-contact is burning, also whatever is felt as pleasant or painful or neither-painful-nor-pleasant that arises with eye-contact for its indispensable condition, that too is burning. Burning with what? Burning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”54 In this regard, the concluding line of the third part’s is therefore particularly meaningful as it seems to perform with everything the way it narrates as regards, for instance, how the fire is burning in such a visual style as reflective of E. E. Cumming’s, which lets one read in ways as if one would simultaneously feel, hear, and / or see how fire is burning and burning out, indeed, through “the eye [that] is burning, forms [that] are burning, eyeconsciousness [that] is burning, eye-contact [that, too,] is burning.” Also in this regard, how could not hope be believed as in the utmost condition of despairs as much as in children’s voice and laughter? How could it not also be believed as inherent in the sounds and echoes of “dry sterile thunder”? Hope is undoubtedly there in the wildfire that burns everything and burns out itself clean with everything it burns in clearing the wasteland of everything for another round of crops of new life. Hope would likewise certainly be there in the “accidental” fire that burns all “the spoils of Poynton” not only as a spectacular scene for “Buddhistic meditation”55 but also as a special occasion of “baptism of fire,” that is, through the all-spoils-unloading and soul-cleansing ritual of fire, as Henry James would so suggest here as there with reference to the final scene of his eponymous later novel. This is indeed the special kind of fire that would show us how ultimately “the fire and the rose are one” (FQ IV, v). This is also the fire that would make everything of the wasteland mere “provisional and occasional” parables or parodies for “the great yet to come” through “a great, redeeming system,”56 which is, however, so deeply inherent in the despair-occasioning wasteland itself and would often come to work in ways so serendipitously as it so occurs to Saul: “just as Saul went out to look for his father’s she-asses and found a kingdom.”57

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NOTES 1. Wang, Yinyang, 138. 2. See Poe, “A Dream within a Dream,” and Keats, “Ode to a Nightingale.” 3. Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 56. 4. Marx, “Louis Bonaparte’s coup The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” (1852) https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/marx​/works​/1852​/18th​-brumaire​/ch01​.htm. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. The hope could still be there however so much less than desirable our relationship with the Great could often be the case. Undoubtedly, our understanding of the great is always such a daunting and yet irresistible challenge in ways as much as the great that must make themselves to be possibly understood. The scenario, in fact, is quite imaginable with regard to the stories we are familiar with. No humanity at the prelapsarian age of Adam and Eve, for instance, could really understand the postlapsarian meaning of death as the consequence of disobedience. Neither would Siddhartha Gautama be able to comprehend the real nature and condition of human suffering until he ventures out of the gate of his secluded palace; nor would even the new message, such as the “sermon on the mount,” be truly understood by the public in general prior to the martyrdom that brings the substantial meaning to it in the form of fructification. This is also why, instead of the accurate plain language he uses when he communicates with his disciples, Jesus, when speaking to the public, has to use “figures of speech,” that is, the “parables,” the expedient metaphorical language, at the risk of miscommunication or misunderstanding of his new message; there would be the inevitable margins of error that would result from the use of the figurative language, even if the “parables” apparently stand for the only common language accessible to the general public; the more parables are used, the more margins of errors accumulate. Here is thus a quite compatible scenario that Gautama Buddha also has to deal with while communicating with the general public, according to Seng Zhao, “Therefore, when he has in mind the final truth (paramartha satya), he says that (things) do not move; when he teaches conventional truth (laukika satya), he says that everything flows” (Lun, The Treaties of Seng-chao, 50). Furthermore, to keep distance from his followers, that is, the “transcendentalists” and even Henry David Thoreau, because they all tend to “appropriate” radically his ideas and thoughts, Emerson, as Henry James noted, has no choice but to defy, defer, and deter what he is so often taken for granted with such “endless disclaimers and explanations: ‘I am not the man you take me for’” (James, “Memoir,” 224). So does Karl Marx, according to Franz Mehring in Karl Marx: The Story of His Life (1918), must also try hard to keep distance from all so-called “Marxists” of his time especially those with “semischolarly Philistine fantasies.” https://www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/mehring​/1918​/marx​ /ch15​.htm. In Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche often indicates how he respects Jesus but resents Christianity. For Confucius, his best students are only those, such as Yan Hui, who repeat him least. For Zen Master Linji Yixuan 臨濟義玄, the founder of Rinzai school, what should we do with all the sages who block our

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minds as they block our ways? “Kill them all,” that is his definitive reply because he is known for having advised his disciples, “Whenever you run into a Buddha on your way, kill him; whenever you run into any elder of yours, kill him, too” (逢佛殺佛, 逢祖殺祖). For Henry James’ observation of Emerson, see “A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson, by James Elliot Cabot,” in Henry James the Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism, 1987. 9. Romans 13: 13–14. 10. Augustine, The Confessions, 177–178. 11. This is a “figure” borrowed from Fredric Jameson when he uses it so accurately while commenting on his vivid impression of Henry James regarding his late novels in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 1981, 221. 12. Alfred Lord Tennyson, “Ulysses,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams, 5th ed., vol. 2 (New York: Norton, 1986), 1108. 13. Emerson, “Nature,” 6. 14. Lawrence Buell, Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 21. 15. Indeed, the rather vivid and precise use of “simile” conveys the beauty of Homer as in Iliad, in which the images of animals are often evoked with its frequent and precise use of similes, and in this way Homer’s habitual use of similes often come to suggest a sharp contrast with Virgil’s Aeneid, which is so loaded with metaphors, in ways as Rochelle Johnson would probably also thus comment here as he does on Thoreau. See. Johnson, “Walden, Rural Hours, and the Dilemma,” 181. 16. Hamilton, The Tell-Tale Article, 40. 17. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 169. 18. Ibid. 19. Rilke, “Panther.” 20. Jay Parini, “Fish-Eyed View,” in New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 83. 21. “In this poem,” as the poet himself so kindly responded with his usual promptness, to my inquiry regarding such observations that I made in an email on July 18, 2021, “I imagine MYSELF as a fish, though it’s meant to suggest feelings, ‘I,’ the speaker, might have in human form, too, with a view from inside the fishbowl! I think of it as a kind of Kafkaesque metamorphosis—that’s a good connection that you make.” 22. Chatman, The Later Style of Henry James, 56. 23. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 169. 24. Ibid., 164. 25. Jay Parini, “Fish-Eyed View,” in New and Collected Poems: 1975–2015 (Boston: Beacon Press, 2016), 83. 26. Ibid., 180. 27. Auerbach, “Odysseus’ Scar,” 13. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 14. 30. Ibid., 13.

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31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 14. 33. Ibid., 23. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 14. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Ibid. 38. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 136. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. (emphasis added). 41. Ibid. 42. In Hongloumeng, the Buddhist monk and the Daoist priest, as we might have already noticed, often show up hand in hand or shoulder by shoulder apparently as close allies in an all-out campaign against the authority of Confucian value system. It seems also quite apparent that one cannot be without the other. But upon a closer look, questions arise as to which one of them is actually calling the shots, the Buddhist monk or the Daoist priest? Is it also accidental that sometimes one appears constantly with a certain particular type of mission, while the other disappears recurrently for another special kind of tasks elsewhere, as if between them there is a clear division of labor or responsibility? While attacking Confucianism, they, however, also act in ways as if they were simultaneously reconfirming, substantiating, or merging into the very system they seek to subvert—quite inadvertently? But what appears particularly significant regarding the relationships between Buddhism and Daoism in Hongloumeng is, nonetheless, vividly reflected, first and foremost, in the story of “genesis” unrolled in the first chapter, where how the universe comes to its present shape is narrated from a synthetic source of both Buddhism and Daoism. At the first glance, the account of how the world is created is undoubtedly of a native Daoist origin. But upon a closer look, it becomes clear that Buddhist elements, such as reincarnation and karmic law, play a decisive role in reconstructing the overall narrative. While Daoism provides the novel concrete narrative substance, the Buddhist cosmic view cements it with a constructive framework. As further reflected in the following passages, when Buddhist monks and Daoist priest come together, the Buddhist monk is obviously the one in charge. What the Buddhist monk and Daoist priest intend to do, in many ways, is quite reminiscent of Book of Job where God and Satan bet on Job’s un/predicable human behavior. 43. Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” 169. 44. Ibid., 164. 45. Helen Gardner, The Composition of “Four Quartets” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 57. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 48. Paul Kramer, Redeeming Time: T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Cambridge, MA: Cowley Publications, 2007), 182. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid.

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51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Thomas Howard, Dove Descending: A Journey Into T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets (Ignatius Press, 2006), 59. 54. Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon translated from the Pali by Ñanamoli Thera 1993 https://www​.accesstoinsight​.org​/tipitaka​/sn​/sn35​/sn35​.028​.nymo​.html. 55. Henry James, What Maisie Knew and The Spoils of Poynton (New York: New American Library, 1984), 352. 56. Lukacs, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” 17. 57. Ibid., 12.

Chapter 4

Turbulent Emotion that Still Moves as Sculpted in Perpetual Tranquility

Upon this stage, the turbulent emotion appears as if all in tranquility recollected; everything seems to emerge so steadily composed in a majestically sculpted image of a restrained verbal structure in such a way as if there were nothing else better to be compared with as suitable analogies for indispensable visual illumination, other than Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker,” Aristide Maillol’s “The Mediterranean,” and Henry Moore’s “The Two Lage Forms” as will be discussed. Indeed, of this fourth part, everything appears so instantly in the masterfully sculpted verbal images, which so immaculately set in display the timely timeless power of time that surreptitiously moves life along and around in ways so majestically in its melancholic motionless perpetual motion. The verbally sculpted images majestically capture at the pivotal moment the saga of life and death as it is so steadily rolled out at this stage in The Waste Land through the irreversible agency of the destinyoccasioned incidents or prophecy-fulfilled anecdotes. Would all the lives then be gone forever or be merely transformed as recyclable energy in variable life-confirming forms, be they termed as incarnation, reincarnation, or nirvanas in terms of the Judaic-Christian, Hindu, or Buddhistic tradition? In whatever literal or figurative sense, when life in all forms appears so submerged deep into the sea, it becomes fully transformed, be it as he, you, Phlebas, Gentile, or Jew, or whoever “once handsome and tall as you.” As the deeply interpenetrated living ecologies, the sea empties everything of any tangible forms while substantiating further the profound void of the vast and often so unruly watery universe with the inexhaustibly steady supply of energy. After the seemingly rapid flows of the third part from the excursion on the Thames to “Carthage then I came” on the site of the sea that mirrors majestically the turmoil of history, the fourth part immediately appears so calm and still, if not stagnant, as if it allows us a much-needed moment for a pensive pause 221

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to get all our troubled emotion recollected in tranquility especially in such a rapid succession through the merry-making moment that reaches its climax with the nonsensical “Weialala” chanting toward the end of the third part. As is also reflected in the poetic structure, which becomes further restrained as a formal “rhythmic transition” or “intermezzo” while vividly indicating how life could emerge likewise so intimately integrated into nature by means of water as by fire through the agency of death; it suggests, in other words, how life could become so incessantly transformed into the deeply interpenetrated community of ecology through the agency of death. However simple or natural as “death by water” may thus appear in ways as it is so calmly narrated in the fourth part, the concise and composed simple narrative reveals the intricate process of cycling of life; it indicates how life would be so quietly transformed from its immediately visible form of attachment to a form of life beyond any form of immediate attachment or visibility; it suggests in this way how life would so constantly become the very substance of nourishment for anything that nourishes it. Understood as it is so depicted in the fourth part, life would become, in other words, the elements that nourish the water of the sea as the nutritious water that nourishes them. As such lifesupporting and livelihood-sustaining nutritious water, the sea nourishes the air with moisture, which would then be transformed as rains. The rains would therefore return to the sea often in the company of thunders as if carrying the divine oracle delivered in ways as it is so narrated in the last part that follows it. Without the sea and without the death by water that transforms life into the form of air and moisture, there would be no life-affirming rains as the sounds of thunder often proclaims and promises. Indeed, as described in the Upanishads, which apparently so appealed to Eliot, the incessant cycle of life so vividly depicted therein would not likely occur without the steady flow of life sustained through the very agency of death as of life. In the live context of The Waste Land, particularly in the fourth part as in the first, life and death could be seen as so constantly transformed as each other’s agent by means of water, fire, and air. Life could be so readily transformed through “death by water” as much as life that would so assert itself from behind, beneath, and between the “dead tree,” “dry stone,” and “stony rubbish” or as so timely sprouting and blooming from underneath the deadly shadows of rocks as from the corpse buried deeply underneath the dirt of garden. From myriad forms of immediate visibility to myriad forms of immense and immeasurable invisibility, life appears transformed as much as the words and poetic patterns both physically and figuratively by means of water and fire; the water and the fire apparently carry as much the power as the earth in transforming life through death into a higher and more essential level of a further fine-tuned form of void that sustains the entire ecological world. This all-sustaining formless form of void therefore tightens up things

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in motion as in mood and sustains the airflow of the climate in the real world as much as the live context of the worded world of The Waste Land. With life being circulated through the agency of death, so circulated is also as much the message of hope as the life of the poem itself, which circulates through the irreplaceable agency of the fourth part. Brief as it is, the fourth part, however, makes life of The Waste Land through a further interpenetrated “writerly” process of reintegration and disintegration in an unending process of metamorphosis, which literally brings us back to our world without “our besotted egos that create such deception for ourselves with the ‘noble lies’ of eternal personal life, superiority over other species.”1 The major point of this short section, at the first sight, seems to be the one to rebut any of such “noble lies” concerning the renewal and regeneration of an eternal personal life, be it in the idea of resurrection, reincarnation, or immortality of human life. Phlebas simply dies; that’s it. Like Stetson’s corpse in the first section, Phlebas’s body yields nothing more than mere decaying residues if at all. How in vain then would it be for humanity to search for immortality even since the time as it is so recorded in The Epic of Gilgamesh. Immortality as Gilgamesh eventually realized is not for humanity however much he was initially so inspired by the fear of death for the first time when he witnessed how it happens to his best friend Enkidu sent to him by Aruru the goddess of creation at the order of Anu the father of gods. The reality of death as Enkidu so personified finally crushed the sense of god-like invincibility or invulnerability that he had always been so convincing of himself. The same irreversible destiny of humanity is here also clearly spelled out with Phlebas the Phoenician as “a fortnight dead.” Even so, with him, this is however still not the only forthright message of this fourth part. However, much as it may often appear as the only forthright message of the fourth part, the message of despair and irreversibility of human density is, as a matter of fact, merely the expedient vehicle of the tenaciously life-affirming message of hope, which is therefore truly the forthright message as much inherent in life itself as it still remains hidden behind, beneath, and between the message of despair in the fourth part and the poem as a whole. This tenacious message of the irreducibly life-affirming hope apparently often remains as much hidden in the same way as Auerbach would so likewise refer to as regards the Hebraic narrative tradition, which would also eventually reveal itself as the pivotal hidden truth about humanity from time to time, no matter how it might otherwise remain invisible behind the sense-bewitching Homeric narrative façade of reality. As almost immaculately exemplified in the fourth part of The Waste Land as in “Burnt Norton” of Four Quartets, the sense-bewitching Homeric narrative façade of reality is here quite identical with the clear-cut message of humanity’s irreversibly destined “death by water” as the seemingly sole forthright message in the fourth part. Indeed, this unique fourth part often appears as

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so immaculately sustained in an almost pure style of classicism restrained to the level of brutal austerity. For exactly the same reason, the hidden message of hope could also be thus captured as so purely clear-cut in an impeccable austere style of classicism as if not to give any room for ambiguity. Furthermore, as previously discussed in the preface with reference to Hokusai’s eponymous woodprint painting, it is exactly from behind this purely forthright message of despair over the irreversible human destiny, there emerges the message of hope, which would otherwise remain so magnificently as “invisible” as the hope-representing Fuji Mount behind the nature’s devastating power as embodied in sharp contrast with the “tiny” Mt. Fuji by the all-attention-grabbing oversized great waves. As hope is so inherently there in despair itself, so is there in this message of mortality. As corpses could bring life in “the cruelest month” of April, so could the cycle of life be thus maintained or sustained through death as its irreplaceable agency in ways not only so detailed in the Upanishads and Daoist classics, such as the Liezi, but also manifested, as will be discussed below, in the marvelous actual cases as recorded in the eponymous book Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest. The life-affirming message of hope is therefore clearly there within every message of despair and death, such as the question that the “I” asked Stetson about the corpse that Stetson planted last year in the garden whether it had “begun to sprout?” or whether it would “bloom this year?” (WL I, iv). Indeed, like Stetson’s corpse in the first section, Phlebas’s dead body also yields nothing more than products of decay. Each, however, also does “resurrect” in a different way following the “rhythmic transformation” of nature in an incessant cycle of life. These incidents of death so referred to apparently suggest resurrection in a revolutionized concept. The cycle of life is not only a physical phenomenon but also a spiritual one, which is alive with the living ecologies of nature. This understanding thus exactly answers the question of whether and how one can enter one’s mother’s womb and be born again. One can certainly thus enter the void of nature as the immeasurably deep “womb” of mother nature and ecologies and be born again. Void therefore really means all the crucial aspects of life that remain hidden because we can neither see nor understand it until the moment we become truly “enlightened.” Indeed, while everything could be so colorfully there in the void of ecologies, there would nonetheless still appear as if nothing is there because we could be, as Eliot so indicates, still so unfortunately as much color-blind or hearing-impaired as we still remain so caught with our limited view of the world as simple unbeing and being; we would thus consequently even miss seeing or hearing in the immeasurably rich and vast spatiotemporal being between and beyond the simple unbeing and being anything as much soul-cleansing and heart-enriching

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as children’s hidden laughter in the foliage or their singing voices in the cupola as in the garden, which could eventually make us see how and why there is no difference between the fire and the rose in the end. REVELATION OF CYCLE OF LIFE IN THE UPANISHADS AND IN THE LIEZI AS IN NATURE This scenario or hidden meaning of hope so subtly delivered through “death by water” could probably be further understood cross-culturally in the Upanishads through the account of the humanity’s destined cycle of life and desired freedom from the incessant cycle through true knowledge obtained of oneself. Such an account does often appear quite compatible with the cosmic view revealed in Four Quartets, particularly in relation with the fundamental issue of human destiny and free will. In the Upanishads, “the early view of the mechanism of rebirth and of the escape from rebirth cycle as depicted in the famous doctrine of five fires,” according to Patrick Ovivelle, “is tied to the old view of a tripartite and enclosed universe.”2 With this cosmic order, “the firmament, the vault of heaven, is viewed as a solid cover,” which “seals up life for an incessant cycle of rebirth.” Consequently, “after they are cremated, humans destined to be reborn go up to the moon in the form of smoke or vapour” and “from there they return to earth as rain, enter plants, and, when they are eaten by a man, become semen, and finally take on a new life in the womb of a woman.”3 Clearly, “the universe is thus a prison with walls above (firmament) and below (earth).”4 Even so, the hope for escape from such a destiny is always there for “those who possess the liberating knowledge” and they therefore “are able to break this cycle, to only opening in the vault of heaven, the only door to freedom” and meanwhile “the sun permits the liberated individual to pass through that opening and escape to the immortal condition outside the universe.”5 Interestingly enough, this significant scheme of “the transmutation of the elements,” as A. David Moody so puts it, is as much alive in Heraclitus, as in the Western narrative tradition onward, concerning how everything in the universe could occur with “the moving from one element to another. [when] [e]arth’s bone-fire, stilled, becomes the purgatorial fire; dust and ashes nourish significant soil; water, transformed, signifies rebirth; the fire, again, becomes tongued, pentecostal, the final element of life and breath and of the multifoliate rose.”6 Consequently, “the scheme gives not a fixed but a dynamic structure, and is the formula for a series of changes which, if rightly followed, resolves all the elements into their quintessence, an ultimate unchanging whole.”7 Similarly, like all other ones in the Liezi, as David Jones argues, if examined “from a scientific perspective, there are clearly leaps of faith”8 in such a

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story of transformation or metamorphosis. None of them, however, seems as incredible as the stories of how the smells and fibers of salmon found inside the bodies of trees in the areas, such as Tongass of Alaska, in ways that have been observed and documented in books, such as Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest by Ray Troll & Amy Gulick. The story of Kuafu along with so many other ones from the Liezi, that is, “the root of the crowfoot becomes woodlice, not the crowfoot, and it is the saliva of kan-yu-ku that becomes the ssu-mi”9 would also add much in terms of our understanding of the issue. Indeed, these stories could, in other words, help us further understand and appreciate the “valuable insight into the evolution and mutual influencing of diverse species giving rise to a complex world,”10 which the Liezi so wonderfully provides along with their compatible versions from our real world of contemporary life. In this regard, the Liezi’s account of how “the root of the crowfoot becomes woodlice . . . the saliva of kanyu-ku . . . becomes the ssu-mi” should not sound any more incredible as the reports on how the smells and fibers of salmon end up inside bodies of trees. The world of ours is literally much more complex than we assume to know of it. The involuntary, irreducible but surreptitious human agency that the Liezi underlines could be indeed best understood in terms of the wonder story of metamorphosis, regarding how salmons become trees and trees salmons in Ray Troll and Amy Gulick‘s book, especially in terms of Douglas H. Chadwick’s account in the chapter titled “And Tress in the Salmon.” Racing, swatting, belly-flopping bears catch dozens of salmon per day during runs. Coastal wolves—those of the archipelago are a unique subspecies—do more fishing than anyone used to suspect. Smaller hunters, (140) from mink to marten, carry salmon into the woods to eat, leaving more carcasses strewn about, together with urine and dung. Bold eagles and ravens do the same. Harlequin ducks dive to raid the fishes’ gravel nests. Even Seller’s jays, normally found high in the conifers, wade in after loose eggs. Chickadees peck at leftover fish. I’ve seen deer nibbling carcasses, too, probably treating them like a transitory mineral lick. Fish scale by dung pile by molted feather by moldering bone-the riches spread out from the water courses onto the mountainsides. Trees near salmon streams grow faster and faster than those farther away. The same is true for bushes, and they produce more berries and seeds. Salmon bodies sunk in the channels or decaying along the banks nourish extra plankton and aquatic insect larvae, which feed the next generation of fry. Other carcasses bump downstream to wash up one estuary shores, where they add to the natural wealth banked in the delta silts.11

Therefore, as we can also now thus imagine following everything so depicted in terms of the infinitely invoked varying scenes of “death by water,” due

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to the myriad of agency and in such a wonderful place “where everything flows into everything else,”12 the trees do become salmons and salmons become trees; it is indeed such a wonderful place where “bears bring so many salmons into forests that the concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus near some Alaskan streams exceed recommended concentrations for commercial fertilizer.”13 Undoubtedly, for Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, “There’s something humbling about being in a real wilderness” of Tongass of Alaska,14 which obviously does not “allow the species of Homo sapiens to be privileged in the process” of evolution. In this regard, everything in such living ecology is participatory and processual by nature beyond the mere scope of logic. The process of such life and death cyclic transformation may often sound like a miracle but is, in fact, as common or reasonable as for us to see how and why a pinecone does not logically become a pine tree but ends up to be part of a squirrel that eats it, neither does an egg necessarily become a chicken but an omelet.15 Is this not such a hidden message of hope inherent in the message of “death by water” even if not as logically as we used to think of the universe our ways or our human-centered way? Indeed, as a matter of fact, exactly as the cases of “death by water” may so indicate, neither does the text of The Waste Land, particularly the fourth part, nor does the Liezi allow the species of Homo sapiens to be privileged in this process. The process thus “brings us back to our world without our besotted egos that create such deception for ourselves with the ‘noble lies’ of eternal personal life, superiority over other species, and there is another place for us in this universe rather than on the earth where we find ourselves”16; instead, it “gives us truths and asks us to accept those truths as an affirmation of the maggots, flies, rodents, and scavengers that ushers us along that return to whence we came.”17 REVELATION OF THE MESSAGE OF HOPE THROUGH “MON FRÈRE” As indicated by this repeated verbal pattern in Genesis, such as “let us . . . ,” and in ways as we previously discussed, it seems as if even God himself would not be able to proceed with, let alone to accomplish, his divine process of creation without the very presence of the Other as someone who must be with him or around him along the way, be it actual or imaginary, from within or from without, as it so appears. So does Gilgamesh, who needs Enkidu to find, recognize, and accept his tragic humanity, that is, his inevitable destiny of death, which is so irrepressibly set with his tragic human mortality. Even if “two thirds [of Gilgamesh were] made [ ] god [only] one third man,” he still, as a result, cannot “escape from the common

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lot of man” simply because “the gods, who do not die, cannot be tragic.”18 Neither for the same reason would it be possible for the speaking I or the one single protagonist to reveal and deliver his message of hope from such a bird’s view without the presence of “you” beside him as his “mon frère.” The speaking I as the only protagonist appeals to “you” as his irreplaceable “mon frère” even at the very beginning for his assistance in the capacity of his “vehicle” for the indispensable mediation. With this fourth part as a brief moment of a pensive pause and with the persona’s emotion appears so well recollected in tranquility upon pondering over, once again, the very smell of the “roses of death,” what appears to be further emphasized is exactly the message of hope, which still remains hidden until this very moment with the brief fourth part as the sense-making reminder or enlightening revelation as regards the ultimate human mortality. The fourth part emphasizes, in other words, the hope of “resurrection,” which is, however, not to be understood in any usual sense but in ways as so alternatively suggested in the fire sermon, the message of cycle of life stated in the Upanishads, and in the natural course of seasonable vicissitude through which life continues in the myriad forms through the corpses of the dead as much as through the vitality of the living. These myriad forms of life, dead or living, thus all become the only single protagonist’s indispensable Other, his “mon frère.” The importance of “you” as “mon frère” as the indispensable Other for the accessibility of hidden message of hope could be literally further understood in terms of Eliot’s special concept of redemption as so intimately related with his understanding of time and consciousness in addition to the seasonal vicissitude of life. If this special concept appears as often revealed in the text of The Waste Land through the duly reference to the decaying process of a wasteland that occurs so incessantly from within as from without, it culminates in its ultimate revelation in Four Quartets. Indeed, the concepts of redemption, time, and consciousness always remain such vital issues in The Waste Land as much as in Four Quartets, especially with regard to whether or how we could deftly ride with time or to stay alive with the void-suggesting timely timeless time in its motionless motion; it means how we can seize “only the unattended moment” to go readily “in and out of time” as in and out of void (FQ III, v) seeking redemption for and from the otherwise unredeemable passage of time. The concept thus always remains an issue, in other words, as regards whether or how we can act quickly for time and void to be readily “captured,” “detained,” “fixed upon [their] down-turned face” even at an unpleasant moment (FQ IV, ii) or be simply pinned down “at the still point of the [madly] turning world” (FQ I, ii) by a pattern however momentarily. We need such a pattern whether it be categorized as “history” for the possibility of redemption in the worded world or as our aesthetically void-grasping or empty-space-defining “form”

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or “pattern” that can make words or music stand, like a Chinese jar, in ways so timely timeless in its perpetual still motion. Indeed, if it is true that “a people without history / Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern / Of timeless moments” whereas “To be conscious is not to be in time” (FQ I, ii), we must then move so quickly, so timely “in and out of time” or void to seize “the unattended moment” (FQ III, v) of our lifetime opportunity; we must maneuver swiftly as if jumping in and out of time, with each and every deft move, to be as always “quick now, here, now” in order to catch our lifedefining moment, such as the motionless motion of timely timeless time as still unattended moment or pattern of time hidden “in the stillness between two waves of the sea” as “a condition of complete simplicity” (FQ IV, v). We would then probably turn the otherwise unconscious moment into our conscious-shaping or self-confidence-sustaining “the form, the pattern” of yinyang to be readily fine-tuned to such a culminating condition of the utmost unambiguous simplicity because “yinyang,” again, as Robin Wang so acutely observes, “is the pattern of timing.” We would then even be able to spot a knack-inspiring twig from amid the otherwise too commonplace to be readily noticeable function words or easily overlooked “figures of speech,” such as “a Chinese jar,” as much as so many other mind-bewildering and thoughts-provoking literary allusions upon or as such twigs; we may then perch for an indispensable self-nourishing or self-redemptive pensive moment to stay “in and out of time” as in and out of void through the densely intricate branches of our immense verbal reality. This is why we need also for our much-needed pensive moments such literary allusions as regards the physically and mentally maimed or “etherized” Fisher King and voyeur-turned former visionary Tiresias, with which we could literally pause to ponder over the actual meaning of life. Apparently, for Eliot, as Cooper points out, there is always such a clear or “familiar distinction between history as chronos and history as kairos, between time as a mere succession that just goes on and those intense moments of revelation in which time stops, when things or events are charged with a ‘seasonal ‘meaning. ‘a meaning derived from its relation to the end.’”19 Therefore, “history,” for Eliot, is undoubtedly such “a pattern / Of timeless moments” of “personal vision and private meaning and moments of Christian revelation.”20 Indeed, as the only passage that should even have passed “the better craftsman,” Ezra Pound’s relentless scrutiny as “beyond improvement” and “now serves as the whole part 4,”21 is it not this unusually brief fourth part exactly such a knack-inspiring twig upon which we may perch for an indispensable self-nourishing or self-redemptive pensive moment to stay “in and out of time” as in and out of void through the densely intricate branches of our immense verbal reality on site of “death by water” so simultaneously from within as from without us? Undoubtedly, in this regard, this

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particular brief part does thus function in ways for us as readers to pause for a pensive moment to ponder over the hidden message of hope that would lurk like the Mt. Fuji behind the huge all-attention-grabbing waves as in Hokusai’s famous eponymous painting. The message of hope could also await its moment of revelation in ways as much reminiscent as of the profound Hebraic message of Goethe’s Faust, which, however, could remain as much so imperceptibly hidden, as Jung pointed out, as behind the sensebewitching first part until there comes the second part; it then suddenly reveals itself in ways as Auerbach accounts as in the form of a structural interaction that sustains Western narrative alive with Homeric narrative mode on the one hand and the Hebraic one on the other. If so, this scenario could undoubtedly be understood in terms of such an emphatic reference as Jung made as regards Goethe’s Faust especially in terms of the drastic differences of the first and the second part. The profound difference between the first and second part of Faust therefore marks the differences between the realistic, the psychological, and the visionary modes of artistic creation in ways as Auerbach sees inherent in what he calls the Homeric and Hebraic modes of narrative. For Jung, with “the latter that suddenly reverses all the conditions of the former [,] [the] experience that furnishes the material for artist expression is no longer familiar” but “a strange something that derives its existence from the hinterland of man’s mind—that suggests the abyss of time separating us from prehuman ages, or evokes a superhuman world of contrasting light and darkness.”22 Consequently, there must be, in other words, a stage or moment when consciousness must be uplifted to be “free of entanglement in ‘chronos,” as “time stops” with everything halted to a complete standstill as Kairos.23 Therefore, with its poetic form brutally restrained to the utmost austerity of classicism and made so completely of such an impeccable passage even to the complete approval of Pound, this fourth part indeed often appears in ways so much reminiscent of this special moment of Kairos. Would it not in any way also be as much compatible as with the second movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” as a pensive moment of pause for a muchneeded conscious self-reflection, no matter how it could still suggest so much underneath or through its almost brutally austere form of self-restraint in terms of its verbal expression? Would it not even subtly suggest as much an emotionally overflowing and deity-invoking “intermezzo” as “Avec Maria” of Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana? If so, would it not also be as much attention-grabbing and theme-revealing as Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 18th variation of his Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini? In this regard, the idea of how the succession of time might be momentarily disrupted or halted for a timely revelation or recollection of self-consciousness could also be thus adequately understood as one of the pivotal functions that would ultimately

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be instrumental in revealing the message of hope inherent in or hidden behind this otherwise too straightforward narrative of the irreversible destiny that awaits humanity as an individual or as a race. At the first sight, the fourth part does seem to focus so stoically upon nothing else but the nonchalant acknowledgment or acceptance of the hopeless destiny of humanity for which there remains as if neither possibility of resurrection nor rebirth. Certainly, as regards what it is just on the surface, this brief part could indeed appear too simple to yield any deep message; it would so appear, in other words, too literal to occasion even the question that Nicodemus asks Jesus as regards whether it is really possible or not for one to enter one’s mother womb to be born again. At the same time, the fourth part would also likewise appear too figurative with its possible reference to “the ungraspable phantom” of void or the timely timeless time in a motionless motion for one to come out with any sensible interpretation of the message of hope in terms of the possibility of resurrection in any usual sense. However, exactly because of this either too literal or too figurative opportunity to interpret the text and with this special fourth part as such a special moment for a pensive pause to have our turbulent emotion timely recollected in the tranquility of kairos, everything would then appear gradually clear as to how life would still move on in ways as much suggested by nature as by fire sermon and the messages from the Upanishads. Life would thus certainly move on, particularly with the presence of “you” as the inseparable Other in mediating for the possible message of hope as in assisting the divine process of creation as so narrated in Genesis, especially as indicated by the repeated pivotal verbal pattern, such as “Let us. . .” As the way it is, the divine process of creation often appears quite compatible with the narrative process that creates The Waste Land. The process for both is carried out as much through the performative dialogue between I and you as through the interaction between the sense-bewitching Homeric narrative mode and mind-bewildering Hebraic narrative mode. In this regard, no message of hope would indeed ever be possibly retrieved from this momentary pause upon life, however pensive as it might be, unless through the indispensable presence of “I” who must be personable enough to relate us to the indispensable Other, that is, to someone as relatable as Gentile or Jew. This someone indeed must be as intimately relatable as “mon frère,” be it in the past or in the present, be he as the one “who turn the wheel and look to windward” or like anyone by the name of “Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” Even if “the perceiving and performing I” does not even literally appear with a self-referring “I,” the reference to “you,” his inseparable Other, and “he,” apparently reveals his full presence in this fourth part, from which he does “appear” as if being so completely absent at the same time. In ways as Ansel Adams does with his “Moon and Half Dome,” this picture

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that captures the pure image of death as the irreplaceable vehicle of life through the immaculate agency of the sea also captures the almighty “invisible hand” of the artist’s as a unique self-portrait of his masterful perceiving and performing narrative power in the disguise of “I.” The utterly irreducible presence of “I” forever rekindles the message of hope through the irreducible agency of “you” so inseparably relational with “I,” no matter how “you” could be so infinitely identified or identifiable as nature, destiny, Gentiles, or Jew, life’s incessant “autogenerative” or “self-so-ing” narrative through death, and so on, varying from time to time and under one circumstance after another. This inseparable and irreducible “you” could indeed even be as irreducible as the irreducible “face” or “visage” of the almighty Other in ways as Jay Parini may so indicate through his simultaneously mind-challenging and mind-refreshing book Jesus: The Human Face of God regardless of whether or how this irreducible human “face” or “visage” of God could be understood in terms of Levinas on the issue. REVELATION AS SCULPTED TIMELY TIMELESSNESS OF HOPE IN SOLID MESSAGE OF FLUIDITY Indeed, while the profound meaning of this particular part could be so made sense of as the indispensable “intermezzo” of an all-perceiving and allperforming narrative, it, however, could still be further understood in terms of Auguste Rodin’s “The Thinker.” The terse, verbally sculpted passage appears as much expressive as this powerful image of “the thinker” upon the entrance of hell over the ultimate meaning of life. The ultimate meaning of life could be felt through its brown-colored and rough sea-swells-shaped body, which is so powerfully withdrawn upon itself in an intensive moment and momentum of thinking in an immaculate mode and mood of still motion. The tensely restrained pose of the body suggests, quite ironically, further intensified motion as much in its perpetual stillness as in a rhythmic eerie suspension “between two waves of the sea” as if we are not “Quick now, here, now” enough to untangle ourselves thoroughly from it through pure decisive action of “complete simplicity.” We, therefore, appear so frozen up forever at the very moment of medication upon “death by water.” The meaning of death could be as tangling as deep in ways so reminiscent of the brown-colored Mediterranean, the Cradle of the Western and Northern African civilizations, which is also known in the history as the great battlegrounds and graveyards for humanity. In this regard, “The Thinker” may meditate so intensely upon the ultimate meaning of life through so many tragic occasions of “Death by Water” inasmuch the same way as the fourth part does as a piece of verbally sculpted image of meditation upon “Death

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by Water.” Even so, the sculpture by Rodin does “stand for” the inextinguishable message of hope as much as the fourth part does, however much it may appear as if visualizing so significantly only the heavy meaning or the deep impact of death upon humanity along with a not-so-subtle message of despair. Nonetheless, the message of hope still remains as solid as the muscled body, which speaks so much in sheer silence through the performative body language so motionless in motion as of the timely timeless time, with which humanity stands perpetually alive in its stillness. Once again, the same so visibly “hidden” message of hope appears vividly visualized through the thinking humanity, Cogito, ergo sum. Likewise, however “otherized,” “etherized,” or “alienated” as humanity could often so appear, the perceiving and performing “I” still maintain his “self” even as a thinking person meditating upon “death by water.” Indeed, however inevitably he would remain or become the part of bleak scene of the wasteland as if so deprived or depleted of anything suggestive of hope and inextinguishable human initiative, he is still alive with his thoughts and his initiative to think for himself, by himself, and thus be himself. This could still be as much the same hidden message inherent in the austere fourth part as in the same austere image of Rodin’s “The Thinker” in this regard. Even so, in this context, Aristide Maillol’s statue “The Mediterranean” may appear to be a further specific or relatable visual allusion and illuminating analogy as regards humanity’s centuries-long meditation on the meaning of life through the agency of death on site of the famous sea but also the infamous site of “death by water”: The Mediterranean. As the title “The Mediterranean” itself may so immediately indicate, this image of a woman, a thoughtful mother in thoughtful pondering over the possible meaning of life through death by Aristide Maillol, a student of Rodin’s, certainly appears further expressive of the subject at least in terms of a further simplified or further abstraction-becoming symbolic image than “The Thinker.” “The Mediterranean” is undoubtedly in this regard a modern version of “Venus of Willendorf” even with a likely impact quietly left on Henry Moore’s remarkably further modernistic piece of abstraction and minimalism, “Two Large Forms” (The Serpentine, Hyde Park, London, 1962). This piece by Maillol is so compatible with “The Thinker” not only in terms of its use of medium (bronze), color, pose, but also because of the suggestive “still motion,” the movement, and even the subtle mood that it indicates, which appears in ways further relatable to the specific theme of “death by water” compared with Rodin’s. Also compared with Rodin’s, Maillol’s is undoubtedly of a further avantgarde version particularly in terms of its intricate level of abstraction. This piece by Maillol is apparently not a depiction of an individual woman but rather, like “Venus of Willendorf,” of an overall message of womanhood, motherhood, or simply of humanity

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as a whole. In this regard, like the pure and austere fourth part, this piece suggests great beauty of simplicity and abstraction with all its modernistic implications and minimalistic beauty. The line, for instance, is so curved suggestive of the incessant circular motion for / in a gracefully smooth pattern, again, compatible with “Willendorf” in this way. Her face is also like “Willendorf” made barely visible to enable her body to “stand out” as the focal point for the meaning of general motherhood along with the curvy and circular lines, which could suggest the undisrupted continuation or incessant fluid motion of life itself. Thus, with her face remaining so mysteriously hidden as much as the “I,” which is not immediately referred to even once in the fourth part, her body so androgynous with the suggestive and clearly visible strength and vulnerability, naturally becomes the focal point, which is, however, not around the upper torso but on the lower part of her body, particularly the thigh. Compared with the thigh, neither the head nor hands, nor even the entire upper part of the body, would all appear slightly “small.” If the “small” hands and head may suggest weakness or vulnerability, the thigh so subtly but meaningfully enlarged would certainly suggest, in subtle but vital contrast, strength and stability, especially in the shape of a pyramid that the pose itself reveals upon and along with the meaningfully enlarged thigh. With the adequately enlarged thigh, the sculpture still suggests solid power, strength, and stability, and even the woman’s childbearing power and potential, however, much the very image of her, with the pair of small hands and her head, would suggest vulnerability often at the first sight. With her whole body shrunk so much like a ball, the woman, however, also appears so much alive as if buried deep in thought or shame under the utmost tension or the utterly unbearable pressure of life that could so often only mean surviving upon the brink of death or desperate struggling for the hope of life within the moment upon “death by water,” which is apparently the same hidden theme of the austere fourth part’s. Thus, indeed, as indicated by its very title of “The Mediterranean,” Maillol’s piece immediately relates itself as much to the motherhood of nature as to the immeasurable immensity and immanency of humanity and history, which is, as in the fourth part, so much embodied, enriched, and enlivened by the otherwise seemingly noumenal indifferent being of the incessantly vast and fluid watery universe called the Mediterranean. Undoubtedly, like the bronze-colored statue, the Mediterranean is certainly respected as the cradle of both the Western civilization and the Northern African civilization; it provides humanity the indispensable means to fish, to trade, and to navigate with an expandable living space; it therefore also becomes at the same time the pivotal battleground in history with the incessant clashes occurring between civilizations, such as the devastating Punic wars, with the innumerable losses of lives; it remains in this way like the mother nature turned the utmost

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reluctant witness who has been thus forced to see all and bear all the unending and unbearable reoccurrences of human tragedies. The Mediterranean could indeed be thus at once so calm, peaceful, serene, “romantic,” and brutally relentless and deadly in storms; it could, however, also destroy in an instant everything it has just created with all the livelihoods or living-making means it provides for humanity. Even so, what appears ultimately further confirmed through all these unending and unbearable reoccurrences of human tragedies is the forever life-affirming message of hope. The message of hope often appears so incessantly or steadily revealed and confirmed through all these incessant and as if utterly chaotic and tragic life-crushing recurrences in such a way that these chaotic and tragic recurrences were merely the vehicles or manifestations of the treacherous but tenacious power of the message of hope. Nonetheless, regardless of how much the world would so often appear erratically chaotic beyond remedy, behind all these phenomenal chaos there is always “the form, the pattern,” which, as the tenacious life-affirming message of hope so indicates, would always sustain life and humanity inasmuch the same way as it sustains words and music to make every instant eternalized as a Chinese jar standing so perfectly all alive in its perpetual motionless motion of a peculiar timely timeless mode. The more chaotically despairing the world is, the more life-affirming and forever steadily life-sustaining the invisible message of hope would so constantly assert itself from behind, beneath, and between every tragic occurrence of chaos. Undoubtedly, without the steady influences of the ever-present and forever life-affirming but rarely visible “the form, the pattern” steadily remaining in control in ways as so transformed and asserted as the tenacious message of hope, there would probably not even any live and recurrences of chaos in the first place. The message of hope, for instance, could be observed in “the form, the pattern” that has been so exquisitely shaped to the levels as brutally austere as the classics; as indicated in the austerely brief fourth part, it could be shaped in such exquisitely subtle and vital degree that even a simple use of alliteration would make everything flow as naturally as in the utmost concise from. Indeed, without “the [invisible] form, the pattern” that sustains the visible image of the Mediterranean in such “solid and soft” gentle motion as it sustains inasmuch the same way as it sustains a Chinese jar standing alive in its perpetual motionless motion, how could it ever be possible for the Mediterranean to exist even as a sea in spite of all its awe-striking chaotic watery motion from time to time? Likewise, how could it ever be possible even for us to hear from within ourselves as from the image of motherhood such forever lifeaffirming message of hope from behind, and beneath the conspicuous message of despair and instantly attention-grabbing “image of destruction,” that is “Death by Water” or of “London Bridge is falling down falling down”? How could it be possible for us to catch the same soul-southing sounds of our

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mothers’ heartbeats that sustain the life-affirming message of hope forever, be it through Maillol’s piece, the austere fourth part, or the lullaby of the falling London Bridge? Does not the message of hope thus always remain so alive with the soul-soothing heartbeats that we are all so innately familiar with since our infants or even fetuses time but in ways forever as indispensable but “invisible” as air simply being too indispensable? Who would not take such heartbeats as much for granted as air, given their indispensability for our lives? Certainly, with the tenacious message of hope always so subtly suggested and vitally substantiated in the life-shaping and meaning-sustaining “the form, the pattern,” so often brought to life through masterpieces of art is also the subtle life-affirming motion and mood along with the hidden message of hope, which indeed so often appears as vividly expressed in words as palpably sculpted verbal images as the fourth part shows. Indeed, like Maillol’s piece, this brief part is composed almost to the level of being so brutally restrained and austere in ways compatible only with the quintessential works of classics, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, and The Aeneid, especially in sharp contrast with the rest of The Waste Land. Of the slightly or barely noticeable uneven line by syllabic counting, the entire passage, for instance, appears so immaculately balanced and even in shape and rhythmic pattern, which also flows so naturally from inside out but in a deliberately restrained pace in ways as steadily punctured as if only with such vital w-sounding alliterated lines, “. . . Entering the whirlpool. / Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.” The alliteration seems to guarantee the natural and steadily restrained rhythmic flow of the poetic lines like the smooth and peaceful flow of the sea with occasional ripples in ways so characteristic of Eliot’s major poetic works, such as Four Quartets. The alliterated lines in the austere pattern certainly suggest the deceptively real and surreal sense or “intermediary sensation” of calmness as if of an eerie sense of peace about a living volcano ready to erupt at any moment. Even the words, such as “who” and “once,” could add subtle ripple-like effect through alternative visual and actual sound impact in the live prosodic pattern. This verbally sculpted fourth part certainly contains in its simplest but pure aesthetic or synaesthetic form or pattern all the intricate meanings over life and death in ways as they could all be so visualized in Rodin’s as Maillol’s piece as perpetually as a Chinese jar in still motion.24 Indeed, the message of hope could even be detected in the fourth part as the “unpremeditated, accidental” redefinition of “beauty” and “charm” along with and against the classical definition of poetry as performing art and sculpture and painting as static art through its live context in such a way that it so significantly enriches the meaning of beauty and charm in the live context

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of the worded world as in the real world. Undoubtedly as briefly mentioned in the preface and discussed further in chapter 2, this verbally sculpted vivid audible image of “Death by Water” that becomes thus further visualized or visualizable through Rodin’s and Maillol’s piece would even often appear to pose such a critical challenge to the classical concept of beauty and charm that Lessing famously argues in Laocoon. Apparently, with the vivid images of the sea so meaningfully painted or sculpted in words, everything likewise painted or sculpted and associated with it in the worded world of The Waste Land would not only seem to move but also often tend to stand impeccably clear-cut, palpable, and utterly motionless in motion at the same time as a special still-life painting or a piece of statue in its utmost being of serene immobility. Consequently, the vividly sculpted image of the sea would suggest charm “by changing beauty into charm” if “charm,” as Lessing so defines it, is indeed “beauty in motion”; it, however, still remains at the same time as such perpetually “transitory beauty” as if sculpted so perfectly still in motionless motion and therefore always evokes our “desires to see [it] again and again” however much beauty and charm may not seem compatible with each other as Lessing so insists.25 The assumed sovereignty of poetry as distinctively art of the temporal mode and painting of the spatial mode, as Lessing so argues in Laocoon, indeed, thus often appear so arbitrary here in the context of The Waste Land as in the context of Four Quartets. Thus, as much clear-cut, simple, and palpable in its form, which is certainly so compatible with the fourth part as an impeccable case for mutual illumination, Maillol’s piece also shows again and again so synaesthetically how it is simultaneously a “close form” and an “open form” in accordance with and in spite of any fixed definition as it is thus simultaneously a piece of “beauty” that “charms.” When one can hardly take one’s eyes off from the beauty of the statue, it remains a close form, especially when one appears so taken, for instance, by the statue itself as it thus stands as if so impeccably alive in its own “still motion” with such a shaded texture in subtle layers of shadows and light from the sun. However, it could thus also instantly become an “open form” when one’s attention appears constantly led away from the artwork itself to the sources of light and life from the very environment that enlivens and enriches the statue with all the subtle beauty of shades and shadows through the different rays of light from all possible directions in the open space around. One’s eyes would therefore travel to and from between the artwork and the environment, which enlivens the artwork that enlivens it at the same time. Likewise, in this way, the verbally sculpted image of the sea in the brief fourth part suggests time’s motionless motion of its timely timelessness in a subtle moment so reflective of the full void or substantive emptiness of the universe alive. The universe so reflected is therefore the one that witnesses,

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bears, and absorbs as many farces as sagas of the common destiny of humanity that makes up as innumerous occasions of life and death, be it as of a down-to-earth version of La Comédie humaine through the irreplaceable agency of water or of an elevated version of La divina commedia through the agency of fire. However, as much efficient as the agency of fire, the agency of water also thus sustains the endless cycle of life and death with forever renewable energy of living ecology for humanity both physically and figuratively. This endless cycle of life, through the agency of water and fire, would be particularly illuminated in ways as the Upanishads so suggests in the following fifth part with a divine message of hope delivered even through the lingering echoes of the dry and sterile thunderclaps that bring no immediate relief with any instant raindrop but the everlasting echoes of hope from within as from without. FROM “THE MEDITERRANEAN” TO “TWO LARGE FORMS”: DISCOVERING THE SCULPTED PIVOTAL MESSAGE However, to understand the fourth part as much as possible, especially in terms of the quintessential characteristics of classism it so exemplifies, it is not “The Mediterranean” but Henry Moore’s “Two Large Forms” that would give the much-needed help of illumination in ways as the fourth part truly demands and deserves. Literally, simplified further as it is so simultaneously a close and open form, the statue of “Two Large Forms” (The Serpentine, Hyde Park, London, 1969) is indeed quite compatible with the austere fourth part. Undoubtedly, so very much like our experience with the equally austere “Two Large Forms,” the more we read closely the austere fourth part, the more we would feel so much about everything so immanently and immeasurably absent from it in such a way as if everything absent would also so literally at once around it, upon it, with it, and within it, like the invisible but ever-present irreparable agency of the perceiving and performing I or the artist himself. The more we read it, the more we would feel about the Zenlike imminent and immeasurable presence of the meaningful void around so immediately from within as from without. This Zen-like experience certainly speaks for the pervasively ever-present sense of void as the inexhaustible natural and cultural ecologies that both physically and spiritually absorb all, dead or alive, transform and radiate with them all. However much this special Zen-like feeling would be possibly occasioned by Maillol’s piece, it would never be so fulfilled unless through such a beautifully further austere and abstract modernistic piece with pure flavor of classicism as Moore’s “Two Large Forms,” which suggests further the Zen-like presence and power of

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void; we would then feel more about it while reading the austere fourth part or become further aware of it through the powerful mediation or agency of Maillol’s piece that occasions it. Indeed, very much like the fourth piece in the overall context of The Waste Land, the “Two Large Forms” sits where it is in its natural as well as humanistic context as odd, awkward, or even as awe-striking as a Chinese jar so perpetually motionless in motion or as humble as a “meanest flower that blows [and] can give [t]houghts that do often lie too deep for tears.” Even so, just like the fourth part that fits so perfectly in its own way into the overall context of The Waste Land, so does “Two Large Forms” in its way. Indeed, in ways so compatible with “The Mediterranean,” the statue literally reconciles everything otherwise utterly irreconcilable with its simple noumenal being, which however means infinitely so much. We can see, for instance, how the work intermingles harmoniously with and in nature to become an organic part of it, especially with its expressive body that suggests a deceptive smoothness, soothing lightness, smooth warmness, and joyful feeling of togetherness, despite its weight and size and material. Also like “The Mediterranean,” we can appreciate this artwork as both “closed form,” which requires and directs attention on itself, and “open form,” which leads our eyes away from the artwork itself to the surroundings. The surroundings in turn provide meaningful space and light that make shades and shadows of reflections. We can thus see how nature becomes a definite as well as an infinite framework, a backdrop with everlasting and ever-changing subtleties to suggest the rare beauty of both natural and human creation. The same can also be said of Taj Mahal. Its white dome, for instance, also reflects all the changing subtitles or nuances of sky as the day moves from sun rising to sun setting. With its austere verbal message and image, the extremely “odd” but perfectly fitting fourth part could also thus often appear so impeccably blended in the context of its verbal environment inasmuch the same way as does “Two Large Forms” with its environment. Its impeccable impact could appear so compatible not only with the Chinese jar that Eliot so marvelously depicts in Four Quartets but also to Wallace Stevens’s remarkable Tennessee jar, which sits there so perfectly still, alone and superbly aloof “upon the hill” as a meaningful and beautiful “eyesore,” an odd, awkward but awe-striking Ding an sich, which, for the viewers, could always be so at once mind-bewildering and mind-refreshing. The fourth part that appears so visualized or so visualizable in the image of “Two Large Forms” could indeed thus also be as simultaneously mind-boggling and thought-provoking in its special milieu as the Tennessee jar that meaningfully “took dominion everywhere” with its shaped presence, “round,” “gray and bare” but “tall and of a port in air,” even if “it did not give of bird or bush, / Like nothing else in Tennessee.”26

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Furthermore, indeed, as thus mentioned in the preface, the fourth part does so often appear so aesthetically or synaesthetically in “the form, the pattern” literally as a mini version of the exquisite Four Quartets especially “Burnt Norton” in terms of its classicistic style of brutal austerity. This is indeed “the form, the pattern,” which can make words or music, like a Chinese jar, reach a perpetual state of stillness forever in motionless motion, especially with the above sculptural images, particularly “The Two Large Form,” taken into consideration as the mutually illuminating cases. If so, this comparative reference to “Two Large Forms” is particularly useful not only for us to understand the text of The Waste Land through the fourth part but also for us to make sense of Four Quartets through “Burnt Norton.” First and foremost, it would be helpful, for instance, for us to understand further the fourth part that remains for Pound as “the only passage,” which “Pound found beyond improvement”27 and why “Burnt Norton” likewise has also been recognized as the most austere and structurally the most formal and self-contained piece of Four Quartets. The potentially inexhaustible meaning and beauty of Four Quartets, in other words, could be significantly further explored not only in ways as the Chinese jar so indicates in “Burnt Norton” but also in ways as “Two Large Forms” may equally suggest as an additional illuminating analogy, especially with regard to the fundamental issue, that is, “what is a classic?” which truly concerns Eliot. Indeed, in the form of setting that suggests how the matrix of void sustains the natural beauty all around, visible or invisible, palpable or merely sensible as the indispensable “empty space” where the piece is, “Two Large Forms” yields myriads of tell-tale tints or hints of the timely timeless time in its perpetual stillness or motionless motion; it signifies its own simple noumenal being through its ever-present meaning and beauty as if readily revealed of its ambiguously perspicuous rounded shape and circular lines of fluidity indicating how as a modern version of “classic art [, it] sits on and signals the universal axis” inasmuch the same eye-catching meaningful way as the Chinese jar does in “Burnt Norton.”28 In ways as “Two Large Forms” so suggests as its compatible illumination, the fourth part, as the irreplaceable “rhythmic transformation” that links the first three parts of The Waste Land to its last part, thus truly stands out for its austere beauty and dignified elegance of self-sufficiency; it suggests its inexhaustible inward circular energy and tendency as if indicating, through its perpetual mode of stillness, even further the incessant momentum or power of still motion compared with the rest of The Waste Land; it is particularly so when the fourth part could be thus timely understood not only in terms of “The Mediterranean” but also in terms of “Two Large Forms” for an additional illumination over the exquisite beauty of the timely timeless still motion so characteristic of both especially in terms of the incessant trend or tendency of motion that both pieces suggest from within and without

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themselves. Does not “perfection,” after all, indeed mean “something to be moved towards, not reached”?29 However, even if perfection could indeed be thus understood as something “to be [forever] moved towards, not [possibly] reached,” like Moore’s piece, the fourth part reveals as much a circularity and wholeness which do not necessarily require any further completion” especially amid the invisible but ever-present matrix of void in the worded world as in the natural world;30 it stands, in other words, as much complete and self-sufficient as poetry in form or in structure, that is, in ways so reminiscent of “Two Large Forms” considering how this familiarly strange piece could indeed be taken as a piece of Ding an sich; it means it could indeed be appreciated as a superbly aloof noumenal being with all its suggested incessantly onto-itself and inwardturning gradual flow of energy along with its perpetually self-sustaining and inexhaustibly self-recycling power and self-propelling tendency. In fact, the characteristic serenity and “still motion” that often features classic works is also there as much alive with this fourth part as with “Two Large Forms”; one quietly commands as much as the other the energy of “still motion” that circulates in its motionlessly circular fluid motion. With its gradual and infinitely growing energy flowing simultaneously inside and outside, amid and around itself, the fourth part, as the pivotal piece of “rhythmic transformation,” could also remain in its own context and in its own way as much a steadfast “axial centre of the ‘turning world’” or the pivotal centripetal axis of an increasingly centrifugal universe as “Two Large Forms,” which stands so alive within its physical, metaphysical, and aesthetic environments.31 However, even if so much like “Two Large Forms” as “a thing of itself,” alive with its fluidity of motion “in its [perpetually moving] stillness,” the fourth part may still appear slightly contrary to what Archibald MacLeish envisages in “Ars Poetica”; it does not simply be but indeed also profoundly mean in its full being as “poetry,” so beautifully “standing naked in its bare bones,” not merely dressed up as “poetic.”32 SERENDIPITOUS LAKESIDE CONVERSATION ON “DEATH BY WATER” AT A LITTLE “PARADISE” At this point, almost right upon the moment of its completion, there occurred, quite fruitfully, a serendipitous detour with the chapter on the unique fourth part. As a serendipitous detour, the chapter does not come to its initial conclusion until an anecdotal conversation that occurred between my new colleague, Dr. Sarah Aptilon, an East-Asian religion specialist, and myself, and on a cheerful departmental get-together in the afternoon and evening of July 31. The happy event was so kindly hosted by Dr. Allison Smith, an

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art historian, a genuine aesthete, chairing our Department of Art History Humanities as well as curating the art education part of Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art on our campus, Johnson Country Community College, Overpark, Kansas, Bobby Hackworth, Allison’s husband, a resourceful networking engineer, and Frank Mason Hackworth, Allison and Bobby’s beloved three-year-old “boy.” The get-together became so joyful especially as it was held at the hosts’ exquisitely simple lakeside cottage-turned little “paradise” on site of Lake Lotawana, Missouri, which appeared particularly charming with their luscious Japanese garden-flavored back yards, a Japanese tea-house-like cabana on the slope around the cottage, and the extended stone steps that lead zigzagging to the little dock and water where their regular and speed boats remain hidden.33 Due to Covid-19, Sarah and I never met in person but through Zoom meeting and conference. The conversation with Sarah reminded me not only of Wittgenstein’s Jewish heritage but also of those as if long-forgotten Jewish authors whom I used to study intensively with Jewish literature as my minor focus, such as Isaac Bashevis Singer, J. D. Salinger, Saul Bellow, and even Kenzaburo Oe, because his A Personal Matter simply bears so much influence of Bellow’s Herzog. The conversion also reminded me of Roger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India, especially in terms of the phrase “spiritual ecology” that Kamenetz uses in accounting his fascinating accounts of his and his fellow pilgrims’, such as Allen Ginsberg’s enlightening rendezvous with Tibetan Buddhism through Dalai Lama and afterward their own renewed faith in Judaism. I had been so touched by the term “spiritual ecology” through the accounts and used it so many times in my own publications, such as “Considering Asia and Teaching the Daoist Way: How to Understand Identity, Community, and Ecology in Connection, Perspective, and Practice” in Dynamic of Cultural Counterpoints: Essays in Asian Studies (SUNY Press, 2014). Sarah, however, offered her critical view on Kamenetz’s book. Obviously, her critical insight not only came from her own experience of being Jewish herself but also from her own sojourn in India and seven-year-long experience living in a Buddhist monastery studying the Japanese version of Buddhism in Kyoto, Japan, and her own years of training at Stanford as a scholar of East-Asian Buddhism, with a special focus on Kannon (観音) after her undergraduate years at Yale. Following Sarah’s mind-refreshing critique, I noticed Roger Ames’s notion of our world itself as “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” could be a further specific version of Roger Kamenetz’s “spiritual ecology” for the discussion of the intricate text of The Waste Land including even this particularly “brief” fourth part.34 Literally, this conversation brought me, once again, back to the line that concludes the fourth part: “Gentile or Jew / O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, / Consider Phlebas, who was once

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handsome and tall as you.” With this conversation, I found myself further convinced, that is, however much this last line may sound like a nonchalant acknowledgment or acceptance of “death by water” as the irreversible destiny or a common lot of humanity, what it ultimately further conveys, as it is so personified with the invoked reference to Gentile, Jew, or Phlebas, is the irreducible hope or humanity’s eventual triumph over this inevitable fate, particularly in the case of Judaism, even if this triumph could be perceived as personified on behalf of humanity as a whole. The very survival or survivability of Judaism is itself the very testimony of the irreducible message of hope inherent in the message of despair not only of Judaism but also of the entire human race. There is always the hope of life that triumphs over death and despair even through as much tenaciously irreducible sense of humor as hope inherent in the timely grip of life. As so much and so often reflected in Jewish literature as a whole, this timely grip on life is as much sustained as substantiated by means of brutal sense of realism, satire, and absurdity, be it as reflected in Isaac B. Singer’s “The Spinoza of the City Market,” Bernard Malamud’s The Assistant, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Saul Bellow’s “Looking for Mr. Green” and Herzog, Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Elie Wiesel’s The Night, and, of course, Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.” With the irreducible sense of humor and hope, there is always also the irreducible Judaism known for its irreducible and irreplaceable agency of world civilizations, especially in terms of Erick Auerbach’s account of how Homeric tradition and Hebraic tradition make the Western tradition of narratology in addition to Mathew Arnold account. This is exactly how the message of hope could even be found as so distinctly echoing in the rhythmic sounds of these otherwise nonsensical lullabies, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” We could indeed, as previously discussed, find its rhythmic sounds so reminiscent of the life-affirming sounds of our mothers’ heartbeats that we are all so familiar with since we were all infants or even just fetuses in spite of its conspicuous “image of destruction” and message of despair. Therefore, the seemingly submissive and receptive meditation on “death by water,” which would appear at the first glance as the fourth part’s major theme, ultimately still brings us the message of hope as through the lakeside sojourn and conversation on the crucible of humanity and human civilizations as the irreducible and irreplaceable agency of Judaism so represents. This momentary conversation and human contact would rekindle hope for life even if it would so appear as if soon to be extinguished with any quietly apocalyptic-like scene of “death by water” often from within as from without. In fact, after the conversation, once again, I feel the motif of despair and hope so irreducibly playing through with the irreducible agency of Judaism not only in “Hatikvah” but also in Giuseppe Verdi’s Nabucca especially in “Va, Pensiero,” that is, “The Chorus

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of Hebrew Slaves” I even often hear them all echo so distinctly and so resonantly in Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, especially the second movement. CONCLUSION: REVELATION OF HOPE IN THE TEXT OF VOID AS MEANINGFUL ECOLOGIES In this regard, of all the roads that lead to Rome especially in ways as Isaiah Berlin would argue here in terms of his notion of “informed imagination,”35 the best one for mutual illumination as a conclusion for the chapter ultimately should still be “Two Large Form.” Indeed, very much like an exquisite verbal version of “Two Large Forms” as a meaningful statue of beauty and being, the fourth part upholds a universal message of the irreversible power of death as the irreplaceable human destiny and likewise also as the equally irreplaceable message of hope through the irreversible sea-empowered agency of death by water. The fourth part reveals, in other words, this austere message to all who read and understand it. Certainly, the “Two Large Forms” could often be understood as having been so strategically pivoted where it is in ways as smoothly, harmoniously, or naturally reconcilable as with everything else so otherwise utterly irreconcilable as around, above, and amid it through its simple noumenal being and meaning. If so, should not the fourth part also be thus understood in the context of The Waste Land?36 As a matter of fact, the characteristic onto-infinite timely timeless inward-turning and onwardmoving still motion that we have spotted there with “Two Large Forms” is undoubtedly also there inherent within the closely knitted and immaculately restrained poetic structure that sustains the fourth part, which makes the fourth part stand so impeccably as a thing on itself, Ding an sich. The fourth part certainly reveals Eliot’s supreme “confidence in a formal pattern, within which movement is safely inscribed,” however quintessentially modernistic as The Waste Land would so appear especially in terms of its mosaic structure as a whole.37 No doubt, the more we read the passage, the more we feel the Zen-like presence of the meaningful void around the very text of the fourth part in ways so compatible only with “Two Large Forms,” which stands so impeccably as its “objective correlative.” The more we look at “Two Large Forms,” the more we become further aware of the presence or the mutual influences between the artwork and the environment in which it sits. Likewise, the more we read the fourth part, the more we become further aware of the overall context of The Waste Land. The meaning and life of the “Two Large Forms” change constantly with changes of time and seasons almost as much instantly and constantly from daytime to nighttime as from one season to another. So would be our view and appreciation of the fourth

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part contingent upon our understanding of The Waste Land in relation with it. This is why such a kind of artwork, especially of the value as masterpiece, is often thus at once of a completely finished product and an unending process with so many unending inputs that will emerge not only as human responses but also as the continuous impacts of the natural and con / textual environment altogether. We will therefore be able to enjoy a masterpiece of artwork’s very life of longevity, or its unending durability, which reconciles everything otherwise utterly irreconcilable in terms of all the human and natural elements that make it the way it is. So would be in this regard the exquisite verbal image of “Death by Water” that often functions as such an irreplaceable “rhythmic transition” in relation with the overall text of The Waste Land especially through our readers, who could make an adequate sense of it as “mon frères.”38 Concise but profound with all its soulful messages of life and death, the fourth part would even become another pivotal nexus of crucial allusions in the text of The Waste Land, which always stays so readily “engage[ed] in what Wittgenstein calls criss-crossing [narrative strategy]”39 so characteristic of the intricate live context of The Waste Land. Even in the case with the austere fourth part, the text of The Waste Land indeed resembles the deeply interpenetrated void of living cultural ecologies with its thought-provoking allusions that evoke allusions after allusions from readers for the sheer necessity to “interpret [its] cosmological insights [inherent in] the character of our linguistic activities.”40

NOTES 1. David Jones, “When Butterflies Change into Birds: Life and Death in the Liezi,” in Riding the Wind With Liezi: New Perspectives on the Daoist Classic, ed. Ronnie Littlejohn and Jeffrey Dippmann (SUNY, 2011), 252. 2. Ovivelle, Upanishads, xlvii–xlviii. In fact, this view of the whole universe as “closed” as a prison house is very much there also in The Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the god Anu, for instance, is feared as the “god of firmament” (61). 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Moody, Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, 238. 7. Ibid. 8. Jones, “When Butterflies Change into Birds,” 245. 9. A. C. Graham, The Book of Lieh-Tzu (Columbia UP, 1990), 21–22. 10. Jones, “When Butterflies Change into Birds,” 245. 11. Ray Troll and Amy Gulick, Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest (Braided River, 2010), 139–140. 12. Ibid., 129.

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13. Ibid., 30. 14. Brenda Schwartz-Yeager, Salmon in the Trees, 38. 15. This is a phrase borrowed from Roger Ames’ lectures that I attended, a compatible message of which is also there embedded in the stories of how salmons become tress and trees salmons in Tongass, Alaska. 16. Jones, “When Butterflies Change into Birds,” 252. 17. Ibid. 18. The Epic of Gilgamesh, 61, 7. In this case, it is also compatible with the believed mixed humanity and divinity in ways so immaculately personified and yet so tragically revealed by Jesus especially upon such critical moments in “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33) and (Psalm 22:1), which theorem evokes so many different artistic interpretations it, such as the anonymous “The Painted Cross: St. Francis Legend,” El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross with Landscape,” Peter Paul Rubens’ “Christ on the Cross,” and Phillippe de Champaign’s “Christ on the Cross.” Each one of them tries to reconcile the humanity and divinity conflict with a simultaneously conflicting and complementary view and an attempted emphasis, each in its own way, on the hidden message of hope as so suggestively inherent in the otherwise overwhelming scene of despair. 19. Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets, 170. 20. Ibid. 21. Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice, 158. 22. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 155–156. 23. Cooper, T. S. Eliot and the Ideology of Four Quartets, 170. 24. Quite compatible with the scene in the fourth part, this unique verbal impact that could lead to a scenario of instant life and death reversal right upon the moment when one feels as if one “had approached near to absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half-submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery” (Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York: Bantom, 1981), 139) is also vividly revealed in the following passage. With such intensively orchestrated use of alliterationfacilitated parallelism so monotonously punctured with function word at each critical moment, the eerie sense of stillness and insidious silence of circumstances that deceive and disarm Jim become so real and sensuous to make not only Jim but also the readers hallucinated. Only once in all that time he had again the glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea. That truth is not so often made apparent as people might think. There are many shades in the danger of adventures and gales, and it is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, love, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary—the sunshine, the memories, the future,—which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. (Conrad, Lord Jim, 6)

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For further detail, see also Chen, Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody, 111–112. 25. Lessing, Laocoon, 112. 26. Wallace Stevens, “Anecdote of the Jar,” https://www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/ poetrymagazine​/poems​/14575​/anecdote​-of​-the​-jar. Here again, I thank Dr. Patterson for brining timely to my attention this poem by Stevens. 27. Bedient, He Do the Police Indifferent Voice, 158. 28. Ellis, English Eliot, 16, 17. 29. Ibid., 44. 30. Ibid., 50. 31. Ibid., 16. 32. Ibid., 13 QVD. 33. The cottage is indeed such a serendipitous “paradise” for my wife and me as we visited it for the first time. This exquisitely simple, lakeside “cottage” was remodeled meticulously with every single detail ironed out through impeccable teamwork that combines a genuine aesthete’s best possible artistic vision with a resourceful networking engineer’s utmost deft adaptability over a period of more than four years. As a result, on the lot of a once dilapidated old house built on 1930’s along with an “unweeded garden” as in Hamlet’s term, emerging there now, as it so stands, is this exquisitely simple “cottage,” which, however, becomes such a little lakeside “paradise regained.” Yes, indeed, if Fisher King could not answer his own question, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” when he “sat upon the shore Fishing, with the arid plain behind [him]” (WL V, ix), Allison and Bobby did turn the once dilapidated real estate or “unweeded garden” into a little lakeside paradise for the spirited conversations or improvised dialogues in leisure, especially with their unparallel hospitality in addition to the serendipitous company of Frank, their forever cheerful and friendly three-year-old boy. Frank, however, is literally a very smart and even “humane” canine. Weighing about 75 pounds and active as he always is, he could, however, laid prone so patiently motionless to let a one-year old baby by the name of West play with him by taking his favorite bone from his mouth and then put it back in as if so endlessly for a long while. What a scene to watch! The cute, chunky baby is my new colleague Dr. David VanderHamm’s son. David is a trained guitar performer and musicologist. As Allison told me, Frank’s biological mother was a bluetick coonhound and his biological father is a German shorthair pointer. Frank, also according to Allison, resembles both his biological parents quite a bit, as they are similar. Frank is also named after a former KU basketball point guard Frank Mason now playing for the NBA, the Sacramento Kings. When the real Frank Mason knew about his namesake and saw the pictures through Allison and Bobby in person, he laughed heartily. 34. Indeed, the history of Jewry in China could also be an additional venue to understand the issue of tenacity and survivability of Judaism especially in Ames’ term of how our world remains as deeply “interpenetrated living cultural ecologies” along with Kamenetz’s. Along with India, China is also, according to Immanuel Kant, one of the only two countries in the world, where people of faith based on written scriptures, such as Jews, were known to be converted or assimilated. Even as a barely noticeable footnote in his Religion Within the Limited Reason, Kant acknowledges

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this rare exceptions, because this great philosopher truly believes that “a people which has a written religion (sacred books) never fuses together in one faith with a people (like the Roman Empire, then the entire civilized world) possessing no such book but only rites; instead, sooner or later it makes proselytes” (1960, 127). While this general observation more or less applies worldwide regarding the “remarkable” or otherwise “impossible” survival of the Jews as a people, as Kant so insists, “except the few on the coast of Malabar and possibly a community in China” (127). Pearl Buck also argues through Peony that this exception is made because “In China [the Jews] have never been persecuted, and if they have suffered hardships, these were only the hardships of life in the community where they were” and, as a result, “most Jews had come to think of themselves as Chinese” and “today even the memory of their origin is gone. They are Chinese” (1990, Afterword). This exception occurred quite ironically, as Wendy R. Abraham puts it, because “their religious life and identity as Jews remained intact, undisturbed and unchallenged by the exceptionally tolerant Chinese people and government” (1990, 3). For Michael Pollak, this exception marks a “special situation, one that did not demand as a prerequisite for survival an ongoing capacity for reading the Scriptures of their faith or procuring the assistance of people who could” (1998, 337). In addition, “the stake and the sword” were “never been employed in China” as they were “so often [used] in other regions of the world, to persuade Jews that their physical safety and their spiritual salvation could be simultaneously assured if they would only turned their backs on their own faith and embrace that of the majority” (337). As a result, this special situation, emphasizes Pollak, has effects as “inducements that in time led many Chinese Jew to become Confucians, Buddhists, or Taoists tended, in short, to be gentler and, in the long run, more effective than those held out by Christianity or Islam—though Chinese Jewry would almost surely not have faded totally away if its numbers had been substantially larger or its isolation less complete” (337). But Raphael Israeli’s accounts suggest another version regarding why Jews convert to Confucianism. I suggest that the relatively open and mobile society of the Ming, which allowed Jewish (and Muslin) individuals to rise to prominence in the civil service on the basis of personal merit, provided the Jews in China with an alternative to total immersion in Islam. Muslins have also taken advantage of the same opportunity for advancement, as we have seen, but since they had a strong Muslin community to fall back upon, civil service did not necessarily bring about their assimilation. For Jew who took to Confucianism, it was a break from the oppression of their identity within China, an escape from the memory of their subordinate dhimmi status in the Islamic world, and a relief from their identification with the despised Hui, which had been imposed on them against their will. Therefore, their assimilation in the Chinese system was an irresistible step. (1980, 90 emphasis added)

35. The case undoubtedly should be best understood in parallel with the notion of “informed imagination” as Isaiah Berlin defines it. Indeed, however complex as everything “through the stages of social growth” as “trends or tendencies” could possibly be each in its own way, be it “fascinating” thoughts from “Condorcet, Buckle, Marx, Machiavelli, Vico, [or from] Herder,” everything of our common humanity

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could still be possibly understood as “follow[ing] empirically discoverable patterns . . . , but moving to no single, universal goal; each a world on its own, yet having enough in common with its successors, with whom it forms a continuous line of recognizably human experience, not to be unintelligible to their inhabitants.” Indeed, perhaps, as Berlin so emphasizes, “Only in this way . . . can we hope to understand the unity of human history—the links that connect our own ‘magnificent times’ to our squalid beginnings in ‘the great forest of the earth.” Berlin, “The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities,” italics added. 36. Understanding these artworks is actually quite compatible in ways as Wittgenstein states in the preface to his austere Tractatus: “Perhaps this book will be understood only by someone who has himself already had the thoughts that are expressed in it—or at least similar thoughts. Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it” (3). In addition, Eliot, for Moody, could certainly be regarded as in “some connection with the aesthetic idealism of Pater and other later romantics” such as Henry James, too, “in a sense . . . a later romantic—but never simple” (30). This “never simple” connection, nonetheless, could still be utilized with regard to the issue of motionless motion. In one of James’ later novels, that is, The Spoils of Poynton, the fast spinning top “so swift and fine [in its] revolutions” (152) could strike instantly as so perfectly motionless even to evoke some kind of “a Buddhistic contemplation” in the mind of a detached spectator (415). 37. Ellis, English Eliot, 50. 38. Indeed, as so discussed in the chapter, everything of “Death by Water” could so often, so instantly, remind me at the first sight the famous poetic line by Liu Yuxi 劉禹錫 (772-842), the remarkable Tang poet and philosopher, “沉舟側畔千帆過，病樹前頭萬木春” (chén zhōu cè pàn qiān fān guò, bìng shù qián tóu wàn mù chūn), which describes how thousands of ships sail by where many have sunken and myriad trees and flowers bust in blossoms where so many others withered away. 39. Ames, “Foreword,” xi. 40. Ibid.

Chapter 5

Sounds of Words and Sounds of Thunder and Hope

With reference to Johann Gottfried von Herder, Hugh Kenner’s one particular observation of The Waste Land appears pivotal for us to understand especially the last part of this otherwise quite deceptively pessimistic or “blasphemous” poem of life and humanity in the modern era. Even not exactly as in Four Quartets with such an “ode to joy” in a culminating motif of “complete simplicity” in recognizing how the fire and the rose are ultimately the same, the text of The Waste Land, however, also so serendipitously culminates with the hidden theme of hope in the end. Indeed, Eliot, as Kenner so suggests, belongs to Pound’s generation, which is known for “The Romantic quest for purity”;1 he certainly wants to trace the original pure roots from which the current urbanized tongue derived.”2 Eliot, however, was not in the footsteps set by Wordsworth who “went back to a pre-urban diction, still accessible in strata of society not yet (1799) urbanized, whose denizens ‘hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derided.’”3 Eliot, instead, would have “more daring speculation” in ways as Herder does in having even “wondered about that original deviation”; he would even have “imagined early man naming sounding things with sounds they made, and naming non-sounding things with cries prompted out of some sensorium commune where all senses intervene.”4 This is indeed the particular impact that Eliot seeks especially in the last part. In the part, everything culminates especially with the lines from the Upanishads, which suggests the psychologically specific synaesthetic impact of the visualized or visualizable sounds of thunders through lightening. In the live context of The Waste Land, particularly of the last part, the lightening does suggest the impact in ways as Herder would so indicate, that is, no matter how in fact “lightening does not sound,” it can be expressed by “a word. . . that gives the ear, with the help of an intermediary sensation, 251

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the feeling of sadness and rapidity which the eye had of lightening,” even if with such “a less plausible suggestion in England than in Herder’s Germany, where the word is Blitz.”5 In this regard, besides the cases with William Blake’s “London” and Conrad’s Nostromo as previously discussed, there are also poets like Eliot from across cultures, who would try various possibly conscious or unconscious verbal means to capture the often synaesthetically “intermediary sensation” for the expression of the otherwise utterly inexpressible. Undoubtedly, in “Buffalo Bill’s,” E. E. Cummings, for instance, tried to let the reader not only hear but also see at the same time the astonishing impact of rapid gunshots as the Buffalo Bill would “ride a watersmoothsilver—stallion” right into the arena in ways as smooth as flowing water and blast instantly out of the sky with his rifle, “onetwothreefour five . . . justlikethat,” the five clay pigeons that someone threw up in the air.6 In the line poem “I (a leaf falls one lines),” he also tried to let the reader feel the “intermediary sensation” of hearing the subtle sound or simply the silence of a leaf falling by means of visualizing the process with the famous lines I (a leaf falls one lines).7 So is there the exemplary case with Matsuo Bashō who tries to capture the often synaesthetic “intermediary sensation” in the haiku of lightening, “A flash of lightning / Into the gloom / Goes the heron’s cry,”8 which seems to make Eliot’s reference to lightening in the last part appear as a purely coincidental parody of this haiku, “Only a cock . . . on the rooftree / Co co . . . / In a flash of lightning.” Regardless, in his haiku, Basho seems to want to eternalize the “intermediary sensation” of the fleeing or fleeting moment through the mind-enlightening silence, which is however both audibly and visually striking. Actually, in such an ambiguously synaesthetic split second, do we really hear the heron’s cry or merely see the soundless awe-striking lightening (as light travels faster than sound)? Do we just hear the heron’s cry that is so terrifying as to make us feel instantly as if we did see a soundless lightening that suddenly torn apart the dark heavenly curtain with such relentless force and in such a surrealistic way? Or do we see the lightening that snatches on us with such shocking suddenness and soundlessness that resembles, in our moment of awe and hallucination, the ear-piercing shriek of a heron in the pitch-dark night? Ultimately, whichever particle is actually used in the original as a picked specific interpretation of the ambiguous allpurposeful particle や (ya), be it で (de), を(o), or に(ni), it could still remain a question as to whether heron’s cry is the visualized sound / psychological impact of the lightening or whether there is indeed such a concurring moment of heron’s cry and darkness-piercing lightening.9 Literally, the scene that this haiku evokes could be reminiscent of Edvard Munch’s visualization of “the scream” or the otherwise invisible and inaudible humanity-distorting psychological impact of the imagined or actual sound waves.

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As a result, the haiku also seems to have eternalized the momentary and the fleeting sound of nature in the form of lightening and / or heron’s cry simultaneously from within and from without through the mind-enlightening silence, which becomes so all of a sudden at once audibly and visually striking. Again, this is a unique aesthetic experience that encompasses all human senses by suspending or blurring all our usual logical or sensible distinctions of experiences. Indeed, what this little piece of haiku so magnificently captures is the unique moment and the spectacular “intermediary sensation” that it evokes in ways so reminiscent of what C. G. Jung refers to as the drastic difference or disparity between the first and second parts of Goethe’s Faust. The second part, as Jung so points out, could occur as if, so suddenly, so “foreign and cold, many-sided, demonic and grotesque” as “a grimly ridiculous sample of the eternal chao—a crimen laesae majestatis humanae,” which, as in Nietzsche’s words, “bursts asunder our human standards of value and of aesthetic form.”10 This is, once again, as in Auerbach’s words, a relentless moment of revelation of truth and reality of a hidden Hebraic perspective from behind an otherwise immaculate “intellectual, linguistic, and above all [Homeric] syntactic culture.” This is, once again, a live scenario of “synesthesia” or “intermediary sense” that challenges or defies Lessing’s classical definition of “beauty” and “charm” as regards the perceived distinctions between “performing art,” such as poetry, and the “visual art.” In fact, the “intermediary sense” is literarily so synesthetic by nature, a posteriori. This is also, once again, another meaningful incident that reveals, as Qian Zhongshu mentions in both “Tong Gan” and Guanzhui Bian,11 how one’s eye can hear like ear, how one’s ear can smell like nose, how one’s nose can taste like mouth, how everything becomes so instantly interconnected, and how all the usual distinctions or forms of things quickly disappear when one’s mind and heart appear so fully in concentration12 and how the mystics, such as Saint Martin, who confesses, “I heard flowers that sounded, and saw notes that shone.”13 With our adequate understanding of the meaningfully sound-evoked and sound-sustained “intermediary sensation,” we would therefore move a step further in the right direction to find our often mussed message of hope, which is so naturally inherent in the “intermediary sensation” with all its life-affirming “primitive wisdom” that becomes so performatively the utmost essential part of poetry as “the first language” of humanity and prosody of our heart and soul. THE PERFORMING POWER OF LANGUAGE AND THE SOUL-APPEALING SOUNDS OF WORDS With regard to the performative function of language so explored for the otherwise often overlooked meaning-making impact of “intermediary sensation”

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in ways as discussed so far, it is clear that Eliot may share such notion with Herder as regards how poetry as “the first language” is indeed “A Dictionary of the Soul,” which is not only “at once mythology and the wondrous epic of the actions and voices of all being” but also is inherent in the vital “sensorium commune”-invoking “intermediary sensation.”14 This “intermediary sensation,” however, is therefore rather “an affair of sounds, not of ideas” because idea is more “affiliated with writing” than sounds.15 No wonder, in the context of The Waste Land as in the context of the Upanishads, “DA is the voice of the god in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad speaking thrice out of thunder, as though dictating elements in Herder’s Dictionary of the Soul.”16 Indeed, absolutely no more than ten years out of a Sanskrit classroom when he wrote The Waste Land, Eliot apparently remains as much infatuated with poetry as “the first language” especially in the form of the deeply interpenetrated void and voice of living cultural ecologies. This should make enough sense why “da” becomes in The Waste Land as in the Upanishads “Datta, give, Dayadhyam, sympathize, Damyata, control” or translated as “restraint, honesty, and compassion.” The sound “da” thus indicates “an etymology which makes sympathy and control not a sentiment and an interference but forms of giving”; it suggests, in other words, a special kind of “primitive wisdom,” which is not only a possible remedy for redemption but also “the immemorial energies of language” that would so often evoke mind-refreshing and soulnourishing “philosophical imagination” alive through sound-sustained “intermediary sensation” from across cultures.17 This “primitive wisdom” inherent in the sounds of poetry as “the first language” in ways as the sound of “da” so invokes could therefore certainly suggest, as intended or involuntarily, the possible ways of redemption or paths of hope to pass beyond the wasteland from both within and without in the live context of The Waste Land. We can therefore indeed come to sense how “Datta of heavenly injunction has ravelled from language to language, culture to culture, by way of a Latin past particle to an English noun [as] the mere ‘data’ beneath which minds perish.”18 We can come to sense, in other words, inasmuch the same way as we may have perceived in “the most individual parts of a poet’s work,” as the case with The Waste Land, the utmost “immemorial energies of language” from within and from across the inexhaustible void as our most reliable well of wisdom.19 We may have thus perceived how in each of “the most individual parts of a poet’s work,” there are so many soul-inspiring “dead poets, his ancestors, [who] assert their immortality most vigorously,” and how in language used with right attention there is also “a network of tentacular roots” that may reach “down to the deepest terrors and desires.”20 We would then also possibly come to understand along the same line of thought why and how the otherwise meaningless function words and particles, such as “the,” “da,” “de,” and even the equally “meaningless” sounds

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of phonemes, would also appear so meaningful in a particular context, such as The Waste Land, in ways as we have discussed. Indeed, “by appending to the three Sanskrit thunderclaps a medley of the subsequent tongues of Europe,” Eliot thus also, as Kenner points out, “invokes some two centuries’ philosophical effort to recover the deep memories of the tribe.”21 If so, neither would it be too hard, if at all, for us even to imagine how or how much such “deep memories” remain hidden in the deeply interpenetrated “tribal relationships” of the living void of cultural ecologies because they often appear so naturally inherent in the worded world as much in the real words. All these crucial but hidden cultural and linguistic aspects, in other words, would be possibly perceived in ways as sounds of “da” would so suggest as long as we understand how this is an issue solely contingent upon whether, how, or how much we could be thus aware of them, and as long as we stay alert to them in this way from text to text as “from language to language, culture to culture.”22 In this regard, what would initially appear as the most nonsensical sounding of The Waste Land from “Weialala ” to “Da, Da, Da” could suddenly all come to suggest the “primitive wisdom” of “the first language” inherent in these “performative nonsenses” in ways as we have previously discussed and will soon again with references to the sense-bewitching and mind-bewildering literary allusions especially cited in the original foreign tongues. Clearly, it is only with such awareness of the intricate “tribal relationships” that makes words bond with one another in the form of meaningful verbal strings often through the mediation of “meaningless” function words or phonemes as they bond with the real world from cultures to culture; “the tribal relationships” do often emerge bonded, in other words, as much as “the three Sanskrit thunderclaps” do in delivering “a medley of the subsequent tongues of Europe” as vividly as such an infinitely resonant assortment of the deeply meaningful cultural void-echoing verbal flow. Inasmuch the same way as we would also come to understand from The Waste Land as from Four Quartets how and why the fire and the rose would be accepted as one with our mind-refreshing, heart-enriching, and soul-caressing verbal elixir from “the shores of Asia” as from “the Edgware Road.” With this “intermediary sensation”-evoking and “auditory imagination”-invoking performative verbal function recognized as inherent in the sounds of words, we can then appropriately understand it as primarily the crucial “affair of sounds,” which could be so performatively meaningful; we could, in other words, appreciate it further simultaneously in line with and in spite of the so commonly taken for granted narrative function of words as “idea,” which could be largely more of a business of writing, syntax, and logic, not necessary in line with the meaning-making “intermediary sensation”; it is therefore, in other words, often these performative prosody of “intermediary

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sensation” that brings us the sounds of hope and the rhythm of life in the context of The Waste Land, not any rationally stated or narrated “idea” by all the rational means of writing, grammar, logic; it is in this regard these “the first language”-enlivening and -enlivened “intermediary sensations” that often bring us the voice of hope even from behind or from underneath the ideas and verbal expressions, which may often appear to convey nothing but “the message of despair” with “the image of destruction,” such as the lullaby of “the falling London Bridge.” Indeed, whenever “the voices of The Waste Land “agitate a Romantic darkness where the crazed women drown, ruined kings wait on their thrones, and questers for the Grail ride among perilous rocks,” there is such a message of hope in “the poem’s philology [that] rhymes with such occasions.”23 However, what is probably more to suggest from such scenes could always be the “primitive wisdom” inherent in the sounds of poetry as “the first language”; it would be, in other words, always the rhythmically performative sounds of poetry as “the first language” of hope, which could be as heart-soothing as the lullabies that we all heard from our mothers as the utmost “immemorial” sounds of life of the most special “ode to joy” from their always so life-affirming and soul-consulting heartbeats, which we were all so familiar with as infants or even as fetuses. Undoubtedly, as the very case with The Waste Land, “a Romantic quest for the primitive, for early man giving tongue to impassioned communion with thunder and falling water, had united with romantic Orientalism (Xanadu) to draw philosophical imagination back through Sanskrit to IndoEuropean roots.”24 Ultimately, there is always the unperishable hope of tomorrow alive with such a quest in the first place. MESSAGE OF SOUNDS AS MESSAGE FROM SOUL TO SOUL Therefore, trying to understand the performative message of sound especially for “some sensorium commune where all senses intervene,” it means that we must do it through “intermediary sensation” in accordance with its own culturally enlivened or invoked “dictionary of the soul,” which is certainly as important as to understand ideas. As so intimately related or simply inherent in sounds of poetry as “the first language” of humanity and the living “dictionary of the soul,” the “intermediary sensation” is, again, as Herder understands it, not necessarily always in line with ideas simply because “the affinities of ideas are with writing” or, in other words, not immediately with the grammatical and logical order and structure of meaning deliverable by any “rational” means of our “common” language, especially in the particular context of The Waste Land. The “intermediary sensation” is rather, first and

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foremost, immediately related with sounds or even inherent in the sounds of “nonsenses” in ways as we mentioned in the preface and related chapters. The scenario, indeed as Foucault would so put it, breaks free, however temporarily in its own way, from the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements, grouped together into a system” in “the order of things” preset for ideas and discourse, which would then so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.”25 It is therefore literally these “intermediary sensation”-sustaining sounds inherent in every verbal element that make this last part flow naturally from inside out as the rest, including, in particular, the otherwise “meaningless” function words or phonemes. These otherwise insignificant verbal elements as sounds or phonemes thus make simultaneously “intermediary sensation”-sustaining and -sustained resonant verbal fluidity through the combination of functionwords-mediated verbal phrases; these phrases certainly include even those otherwise so “nonsensical sounding” ones and could also appear so crucial in suggesting issues of location, direction, sequence, and identity with ontological and epistemological significance. As used in the first stanza, the selected verbal phrases indeed appear so instrumental in keeping the “intermediary sensation” alive in fluidity often with alliterated resonant sounding, that is, “After the. . .” “He who was. . .” “We who were. . .” “Here is no. . .” “If there were. . .” “There is not. . .” along with “and” and “a” used immediately one after another in the third stanza at initial position of each line and phrases, that is, “When I . . .” “Who is who . . .” “who is . . .” “Who is that . . .” “What is . . .” and “What are . . . .” The use of such verbal phrases not only sustains the resonant flow of the poem in a coherently performative way but also consequently indicate what is the major concern of this last part in particular; it conveys a pervasive sense of loss as regards the uncertainty of human destiny as much as the tenacity of hope for a certain way out; it suggests ontological confusion, epistemological bewilderment, or teleological concern as regards the ultimate questions of who we are, where we are, and why we are the way we are as humans. Conveyed in a mood that so much concerns us, this “intermediary sensation”-fine-tuning w-sounding flow suggests how we attempt, often in vain, to grasp the ungraspable phantom of life in terms of wherever natural and humanistic landmarks available however elusive or even illusive as they often so appear in the context of The Waste Land. The vital but subtle significance of the use of the verbal phrases in this way could be further understood particularly in terms of Four Quartets. The very nature of each part of Eliot’s last great piece could equally be made sense of, for instance, as so meaningfully suggested in terms of the w-sounding “intermediary sensation”-sustaining fluidity. If the appearance of “what” is more or less quite commonly used in “Burnt Norton,” it could then possibly indicate

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how this first piece likely focuses on the very nature or definition of “time” concerning primarily whether and how it moves or not, whereas “East Coker” appears more concentrated on the issue regarding from and to where, in which way, or in which specific location time would probably move, stay, or leave its traces behind. If so, the frequent appearances of function words, “where,” “which,” even “from which,” “into which,” “of which,” “in which,” “of that which” used in “East Coker” seem to make sense as if there is indeed a persistent effort inherent in the piece in tracing or tracking the magnificent but otherwise, as usual, almost imperceptible “trajectory” of time. Therefore, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, it is these w-sound-stringed-pervasivesense-turned “intermediary sensation” that makes the meaning of the otherwise quite nonsensical ideas of words. Undoubtedly, the utmost profound feeling of poetry as “the first language,” as Herder sees it, could be strictly in this regard “an affair of sounds” in terms of its own prosody as “dictionary of the soul,” not of ideas because “the affinities of ideas are with writing” and there are in the live context of The Waste Land particularly at this point no clearly written ideas, if at all, but meaning-evoking and meaning-enriching ambiguous “intermediary sensation.” In this way, the verbal flow as exemplified by the “intermediary sensation”-sustaining w-sounding strings could function meaningfully in The Waste Land as much as in Four Quartets like “an atmosphere accompanying [sense], which [the word] carried with into every kind of application” in ways as Wittgenstein would so see it;26 likewise, it could also function in ways as what Edmund Burke so often reminded us of. Does not Burke, for instance, so persuasively argue how “Men often act right from their feelings [to stimulation, such as from verbal music], who afterwards reason but ill on them from principle; but as it is impossible to avoid an attempt at such reasoning”?27 However, for “the primitive wisdom” inherent in poetry as “the first language” to be captured alive through “intermediary sensation” that revives the “immemorial energies of language,” what appears immediately further important in the live context of The Waste Land is not just “an affair of sound” but the cyclic pattern of words, which suggests stability, security, and hope. For “cyclic theories of time,” which “accomplish for the learned,” as Kenner emphasizes with reference to Four Quartets, literally amounts to “what mythological rituals for the intellectually unsophisticated”;28 it is because, as Kenner explains, “both mitigates the terror of history, in which events, and most of all man’s personal decisions, are set forever in an irreversible pattern.”29 Even so, as the case with The Waste Land as with Four Quartets, the cyclic energy of life, when suggested particularly through “intermediary sensation” as so naturally inherent in poetry as the “immemorial energies of [the first] language” or the “dictionary of the soul,” means as much to the learned as to the “intellectually unsophisticated,” be it suggested

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in the “cyclic theories of time” or “mythological rituals.” Likewise, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, to compensate the irreversible loss, “poems tend to be cyclic, remembering their beginning, and every act of recognition implies that something like this has been seen before.” In Four Quartets, Eliot, for instance, as Kenner so emphasizes, “drew four elements four seasons, four places into a four-part symmetry which closes as it had opened in a transcended garden.”30 In The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, Eliot also uses cyclic repetition not only to build narrative structure but also to emphasize sense of hope, however subtle as it might be, such as from his reference to the April as “the cruelest month” to the corpse that brings fresh sprouts of life, even if in ways as if so utterly noncyclic at the first sight in the fourth part as discussed. The frequent appearance of the function-words-mediated and basic phonemic-elements-sustained verbal flow therefore makes The Waste Land flow as naturally, as if so endlessly or “cyclically,” from inside out; it further sustains, in other words, the pervasive impact of the cyclic repetition so characteristic of the poem as much as Four Quartets. The “primitive wisdom” is therefore also as much inherent in sounds of poetry as “the first language” the way The Waste Land suggests, that is, so naturally inherent in the cyclic pattern it sustains; it remains a pattern of “a collective quest” in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. Eliot is thus indeed still as much in the mindset as of Europe in the nineteenth century, which, as Kenner emphasizes, “is struggling to encompass an intelligible form for its own past and present” especially in terms of “the image of biologists call ecology—fruitive interaction.”31 This image certainly “come to govern [Eliot’s] vision,” be it so unequivocally revealed in The Waste Land or in Four Quartets; the image however could also emerge so “paradoxical because we can hope about the future while knowing that a cycle leads nowhere new. (Tennyson fancied an Odysseus bored with Ithaca).”32 Regardless, still, “cycles fascinate the mind; there is security in cycles”33; still, “[t]he seasons is cyclic; agriculture is cyclic;”34 it is therefore, undoubtedly, only by the cyclic pattern that words or music can be thus transformed into the perpetual state of being, like a Chinese jar, so perfectly alive, forever, in its motionless motion; it is, in other words, only by means of the cyclic pattern of life can poetry that depicts despair also so ironically or paradoxically suggest hope with all its life-affirming “intermediary sensation” so immediately inherent in the irreducible sounds of the poetry as the “the first language” of humanity, that is, as the very prosody or “dictionary of the soul”; it is only in this way can poetry in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets become the true vehicle that brings hope, “In my beginning is my end.” Therefore, in The Waste Land, there are “once again, the Poems Including History, their inclusiveness, their paradoxical optimism.”35

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HOPE IN THE SOUND OF WATER AS SWEETER, UNHEARD MELODY IN/OF SOUND OF WORDS Therefore, in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, the cyclic pattern is suggested particularly through the cyclic repetition of sounds sustained as fluid verbal patterns that awaken the “primitive wisdom” inherent in poetry as the “the first language” of humanity and “prosody of the soul,” which forever echoes through the “intermediary sensation” in the cyclic rhythms of the heard and even the “sweeter unheard” poetic sounds and melody. In the last part, even if the definite “the,” for instance, is not used in the concentrated ways to produce such an “intermediary sensation” as in the previous parts, it is still quite often used together with preposition as if to emphasize the importance of the sequence in ways as effective as in the previous parts, that is, “In this . . . among the . . . / In the . . . the grass . . . / Over the . . . . about the . . . / There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home.” However, as this line so indicates, what is even more significant is the way the definite “the” is used together with the determiner “this,” prepositions, such as “in,” “over,” about,” and “among,” in addition to the phrase “there is,” in producing a subtle but special impact that culminates in the synaethetic image of a lone cock’s crying sound. The sound may occasion a gust of rains bringing winds, which, as it is so suggestively simulated in the “the” rhythmically punctuated sequence of verbal flow, may come in the speed of flash as a real impact in reality and / or in a mere illusion. However, this illusion could occur so surrealistically in slow motion or in motionless motion in the mind in ways, intended or otherwise, as a compatible parody of Basho’s famous haiku on lightening and heroin’s cry, that is, “A flash of lightning / Into the gloom / Goes the heron’s cry.”36 The particular impact of “intermediary sensation” of the seventh line therefore is sustained with this hidden structure “In this . . . among the . . . / In the . . . the . . . / Over the . . . about the . . . / There is . . .only the . . . .” The structure has the line imbedded in a stealthy but steadily punctuated and slightly a little rushed rhythmic pace, in which the otherwise “meaningless” definite article thus surreptitiously assumes the serendipitously meaningful role along with the prepositions, the determiner, and the verbal phrase, “there is,” as if all for the purpose of intensifying the parodic impact of a wasteland, which could be so real and surreal, ghostly alive from inside as from outside. This line, however, would not have this impact if it were not supported even from the very beginning by such paralleled structure, which is, nonetheless, further sustained with another in parallel also from the very beginning as mentioned above, that is, “After the . . . / After the . . . / After the . . . / The . . . and the . . . .” Furthermore, with its definite article used in such a way with preposition “in,” “over,” “among, “about,” the determiner “this,” and the

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verbal phrase “there is,” this line seems also to convey an increased sense of urgency. This sense of urgency consequently suggests as much an epistemological bewilderment as an utmost ontological confusion as to where one is, after all. This particularly the case when the line is read in rapid succession along with the lines of fourth and fifth stanzas, most of which also begin with all the w-sound alliterated phrases, such as “where is . . .,” “who are. . .,” “what is . . .,” “when I. . .,” and so on, This increased sense of urgency appears further intensified with such “and”-led lines almost at every initial position of each line in the third stanza “And .. / . . . / And . . . / And . . . / A . . . / A . . . / . . . / . . . And . . .” and in sixth stanza “A . . . / And . . . / And . . . / Whistled, and . . .. / And . . . / And . . . / . . . / And . . . and . . . .” In both stanzas even the sound of “a” alternates with “and” to add some subtle but atmospherically sense-intensifying variety. However, what adds significantly further to the increased sense of concern in the verbal structure is the rapid repetition of contrapuntal pattern “there is,” and “there is no” or “there is not” particularly with the alternation of the key words, “water” and “rock,” in the second and third stanza. In the line of 180 words of the 2 stanzas, this verbal structure makes the contrapuntal alternation particularly effective. In the stanzas, both “water” and “rock,” quite interestingly, appear nine times. They appear so interlocked not only through the common vowel sound / ɔ / but also through where each is posited. With regard to the sheer number, the appearance of “water” and “rock” may not be quite significant, but it maters significantly with regard to the pivotal position where they each appear in close vicinity or where they each maintain in readily adjustable distance from one another for a contrapuntal rhythmic balance in ways otherwise impossible. The two words therefore instantly emerge as so instrumental in creating a live sensemaking and meaning-generating verbal network not only through their lexical meaning, a priori, but also their actual contextualized being, a posteriori. In the verbal network, the actual power of verbal expression does not often seem to come as much from the actual application of each word or phoneme but rather, ad infinitum, from the invisible but essential and theoretically infinite applicability of each word that guarantees validity of each application. This power of applicability always remains so essential but invisible as deeply interpenetrated cultural and linguistic ecologies so pervasively ubiquitous and permeating in influences as the everpresent void of “langue.” This is also why, for Wittgenstein, “to understand a sentence” could then also simply mean “to understand a language,” whereas “to understand a language means to be master of a technique,” which thus means to understand the language, hand-on, with the reliable meaningful traces-detecting technique or inconsistency-defining “true wit” in the first place. This is particularly true especially when considering how even a single language could be so much like such a deeply interpenetrated hybrid

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of cultural ecologies often so “unwilling to subject itself to classic disciplines.” In the network of the verbal context as if solely of its own making, the word “rock” could indeed appear as if so indefinitely to mean by means of finding any word sounding close enough with itself to resonate. “Rock” could therefore so readily to resonate or to “rock” so meaningfully not only with the word “water” but also with “road” through the shared consonant / r / and the vowel sounds / ɔ / of “rock” and / ou / of “road,” whereas the word “water” could also readily extend itself through any word sharing the same / w / sound, such as “winding,” “which,” “without,” “were,” and even “sweet.” So is the case with “mountain.” Even if it appears merely five times, its presence and position also emerge significant as the alternative nexus in bringing together words sharing common vowel and consonant sounds, such as “month,” “among,” “amongst,” and “mudcracked,” to form a rhythmically meaningful flow along with the verbal flow shaped by “water,” “rock,” and “drop.” So resonantly interlocked with one another, such common phonemicgens-sharing words led by “water,” “rock,” and “mountain,” the passage often sounds defiantly playful while making a rhythmically resonating verbal string or network with sounds so meaningfully contrapuntal in mood. With humorous and light-hearted and also subtle tint of sarcasm and defiance, the passage seems to suggest an alternative or contrapuntal note of hope and spirited mood along with and against the seemingly prevailing message of despair at the critical moment in the last section when even “dry sterile thunder without rain” may bring rays of hope. Indeed, with such phenomenal verbal reality that suggests this “paradoxical optimism” so characteristic of the live context of The Waste Land,37 there is always such a message of hope remaining hidden or simply inherent in “the poem’s philology [that] rhymes with such occasions” of destruction and despair, however hopeless or disparate as they often so strike.38 HOPE IN THE INTERLOCKING SOUND PATTERN THAT EXPRESSES THE INEXPRESSIBLE Indeed, this interlocking and interplaying verbal performance could even sound so particularly playful and jingling as to suggest a kind of carefree defiance and distain against any possible notion of utmost hopelessness or despair. “Here is no water but only rock / Rock and no water and the sandy road / The road winding above among the mountains / Which are mountains of rock without water.” This meaningful jingling “water”-“rock” wordplay sounds even more so when it joins resonantly with “drip drop” in the line “But sound of water over a rock / . . . / Drip drop . . . / But there is no water . . . .” This line would even seem to jingle in this way to tease anyone who

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may read The Waste Land with nothing more than a prevailing pessimistic motif. This line would also seem to make an emphatic point, with a lighthearted mood, that is, however life could be miserable, still, there is the undying human spirit that would cheer up, at any moment, at any time, any possibility of hope, regardless of how the spirit could sound as meaninglessly or nonsensically jingling as some childish lullabies. The line thus seems to be as playfully satirical as the lullaby of “London Bridge is falling down falling down,” which, as discussed above, often appears to suggest a pessimistic view with its seemingly so conspicuous “image of destruction.” In this regard, be they originally categorized as “meaningful” content words or “meaningless” functions words, all the words here in the live verbal context therefore appear so meaningfully grouped together around “water, rock” such as “winding,” “which,” “without,” “were,” and even “sweet,” as equal partners in making subtle but vital contribution to the merry-making spirit that emerges so alive in the verbal string. So are these words centered around the key word “mountain,” such as “month,” “among,” “amongst,” and “mudracked.” They all play effective roles in making and marking the tenacious live spirit of humanity that brings hope and breaks the thick and sticky mood of despair in ways otherwise utterly impossible, especially in terms of each discrete lexical meaning or predesignated part of speech. The meaningful context words, such as “water,” “rock,” and “drop,” would then all ironically become further meaningful by lowering or accommodating their usual verbal statuses temporarily to their actual phonemic beings or functions, whereas function words, such as “were” and “which” also become as much meaningful as “water,” “rock,” and “drop” in this meaning-making verbal flow or music. This flow of verbal music could indeed thus simultaneously be and mean at once in accordance with and in spite of whatever their discretely fixed lexical meanings or presumably given authorial intentions contingent only pragmatically upon their actual roles in the live and forever meaning-making void of live context. This live context of void would then be “sorted out” afresh for the “creation” of a different or further enriched meaningful worded world that substantiates the real world of ours from within as from without. Certainly, with everything so interlocked for the meaningful alternation and repetition, each word then shapes one another into such an alternative meaning expressing pattern that suggests the vital and subtle mood and meaning otherwise utterly inexpressible if merely by means of each word’s discrete lexically defined or definable meaning or parts of speech alone. This alterative pattern made of repetitive and alternating sounds and phonemes shared in common therefore reveals a certain deeply hidden emotion or concern of location, direction, or simply the ontological uncertainty and epistemological bewilderment as regards ultimately where or whether one really is in the wilderness of the wasteland. Each word thus at the same time

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also conveys the holistic sensemaking “atmosphere” otherwise utterly unutterable through the verbal flows or waves made of common phonemes that each word shares with one another. In the live context, the function-wordsmediated flexibly interlocking and interplaying verbal structures thus make it possible not only for the words to come in shapes of various meaningful “intermediary sensation”-awakening resonant verbal strings but also to enable the poem to flow so naturally from inside out without being confined to any strict end rhyme pattern in ways so characteristic of the verbal fluidity of The Waste Land as of Four Quartets to say the least. These structures or naturally fluid verbal formations make The Waste Land quintessentially poetry, that is, as “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty,”39 not merely being poetic, or as “meter-making argument.”40 Also, in the live context, particularly as indicated by these otherwise so much nonsensically sounding and yet “atmosphere”-suggesting verbal repetition and the “rhetorical” questions, such as “how to set the wasteland in order?” or “how could it even be possibly set in order?” would even become the haunting issues for the readers as much as for the Fisher King. Indeed, as will be discussed further, the question that “I,” as the incarnated Fisher King asks, could often sound so much like a self-mocking rhetorical question that adamantly rules out any of such possibility of setting the wasteland in order, whereas it could also sound really like an insane desire to pursue the utterly impossible mission as already so self-consciously perceived. Meanwhile, the question could even also be taken seriously as a real question that reveals a deep concern or utmost bewilderment as regards the actual possibility or utmost impossibility of such an order-setting business or mission in the first place. What however also appears to be thus put in question with such an utterly unanswerable question of the utmost skeptical nature is not simply of humanity’s ultimate capability to bring the life-rejuvenating order to the wasteland; it is rather, first and foremost, of humanity’s fundamental cognitive capability in realistically assessing the actual feasibility of the mission in the first place prior to any possible assessment of humanity’s actual capability of caring about or carrying out the mission in reality. What the question thus puts further into question could even ultimately be a language issues, as Wittgenstein himself would so point out, because the reason simply is “when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked,”41 nor would there be even doubt for the same reason because “doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said.”42 The questions the Fisher King asks therefore puts everything in doubt or simply as the utterly unanswerable questions or sheer “nonsenses.” Regardless, however much the humanity’s actual capability of bringing the world back in order could be so initially put into serious question even

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at such a basic cognitive and linguistical stage, what remains further unquestionable is nature’s innate self-rejuvenating power through a potentially endless process of seasonal vicissitude or cyclic renewal even if how “cruel” the process may often appear from time to time as from season to season. Indeed, inasmuch the same way as deeply interpenetrated living ecologies as we would so perceive humanity and culture, nature, as it is so revealed in the context, always remains such an irreplaceable analogy for us to understand humanity especially in terms of its often questionable but forever lifeaffirming and order-restoring primordial virtues as culturally sustained or sustainable “natural instincts,” such as “restraint, honest, and compassion” as they are so suggested through sounds of “da, da, da” from thunderclaps as from the Upanishads. These are humanity’s culturally sustainable “natural instincts” revealed often as divine messages not only through the resonant echoes of thunderclaps but also through such a “cruelest” seasonal scene of the month of April. Nonetheless, “to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature: to show virtue her feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” as it is so expressed in Hamlet, the wasteland of nature thus also becomes mirror of humanity, regardless of how much everything would still appear or remain as if so utterly drained of life or laid completely waste from within as from without or severely maimed as much spiritually as physically. However, also from within as from without, what remains ultimately undrainable or irreducible as ever is the tenacious power of hope in ways as nature so promises in this context through its primordial humanity reawakening and natural order reasserting power and virtues of “restraint, honesty, and compassion” so delivered as divine message. Indeed, once deprived of these primordial natural virtues or nature-sustaining power for however or whatever brief a period of time, the wonder land would be soon deteriorated into wasteland, barren and desolate, as it is so depicted here in the poem, with love so degenerated into loveless sexual desire and sex so devoid of passion. However, as nature needs water for restoring its liferejuvenating power in ways as thunderclaps promise and rains bring, so does the wasteland of humanity from both within and without need the primordial virtues for its recovery with sound of “da, da, da” as the revelation of “divine message” in ways as St. Thomas Aquinas would also thus suggest here as in Summa Theologica in the spirit of Sermon on the Mount.43 HOPE IN THE PRIMITIVE AND PERFORMATIVE SOUNDS OF LIFE In this regard, hope is there at nowhere else but inherent in the very sounds of words that supposedly convey meanings or meaningful “ideas” but instead

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often sound like carrying nothing other than nonsenses along with “image of destruction” and scenes of despair. Even so, without the need to scratch one’s head, one would still instantly know with one’s guts feeling that there could indeed be also something there in the nonsensical sounding verbal expressions. The message of hope is often thus delivered to one through the “intermediary sensation” that comes with such verbal expressions, be they in the form of direct quotations in the original foreign tongues or in such nonsensical sounding nursery lullabies as “London Bridge is falling down falling down.” In the context of The Waste Land. Hope remains hidden in the sounds of language as the primitive and performative sounds of life until it is awakened or transformed into the meaning-suggesting but nonsensical sounding “intermediary sensation” but, first and foremost, through readers’ own acutely awakened awareness or sensitivity. However much this verbal transformation appears most frequently in Four Quartets, its occurrence could also be readily detected as much in The Waste Land as elsewhere. Within the meaning-suggesting or sensemaking verbal strings, no matter how all the words would often appear so “innocent” as if with no more than their regular lexical roles to play, each of them would also emerge from time to time as so involved in creating the substantive rhythmic patterns with the phonemes that they each carry and share. This is the case with words, such as “water,” “rock,” “mountain,” as discussed above; together, they literally make up the subtle but vital verbal strings in the second stanza of the fifth part’s, certainly, in addition to any possible allusive meaning. As some of the most commonly used words, “water,” “rock,” and “mountain,” which are so often repeated to make up the verbal strings, these commonplace words should therefore by no means only be valued for any of their possible verbal images, meanings, and allusions without taking into consideration their meaning-enlivening and “intermediary sensation”-enriching values as sounds or phonemes. Indeed, the verbal strings with suggestive emphasis on sounds and echoes in the last part occur more or less with the same kind of “tricks” as exemplified in the same passage we discussed above. Undoubtedly, as is so characteristic of the meaningful wordplay in the second stanza, every single verbal element becomes so intimately involved or interlocked with one another to make a symphonic tapestry or verbal mosaic. In this regard, so meaningfully or playfully interlocked with one another, as a matter of fact, are not only “water-rock” and “drip-drop” pattern but also “here is” and “there were” phrases that build up coherence also through rhythm-setting and adjusting agency of “the” and “and” in addition to the w-sounding and m-sounding alliteration; the coherent verbal network even comprises all the otherwise utterly too trivial to be noticeable phenomes or sounds, such as “t,” “d,” “k,” “er,” and “ea,” “i,”. All these elements appear so “innocently” repeated or arranged in such purely “regular”

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ways also suggest their meaning-making influences in the verbal context or environment. Indeed, when inspected closer from a different perspective, the overall meaning of the same passage often appears as if created from a mesmerizing moment of relaxation, which seems to invite us to let go whatever initial concerns we might have about how to capture the meaning or idea from the depressing and nonsensical scenario only to dance to the verbal music or to “rock ‘n’ roll” with “rock” and “road”; it wants us to enjoy, however momentarily, the very process or moment of “the rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” the way poetry so truly is or should so performatively be. Indeed, even if just for a very brief moment, the passage simply wants us to become happily the disarmed captives of the mesmerizing impact of the verbal music. Like the nonsensical sounding “London Bridge is falling down falling down,” the verbal music as the passage so exemplified is simply as soothing as the lullaby we are so familiar with and would “feel” so safe, calmed down, and comfortable to listen to regardless of whatever “image of destruction” it carries or whatever possible scene of despair it suggests. This would be the likewise impact of the verbal music on us as when we were still just infants or even mere fetuses in the wombs. Would it be possible for us then as infants or fetuses to “care” about whether or how the London Bridge when we do not even have slightest “idea” of what London Bridge is? What we might “know” or simply “care” about as infants or fetuses could be nothing but the soothing verbal music that always calms us down and makes us “feel” safe and protected. This kind of conspicuous idea, image, or message of destruction and despair could only be something of an expedient vehicle to deliver the verbal music for exactly the opposite impact. Still, we can all feel as much relaxed with this particular verbal music of “the poem’s [lifeaffirming] philology [that] rhymes with such occasions” so perfectly with “paradoxical optimism” as before, as ever, while slowly swinging or waltzing to its soul-soothing rhythms composed through as if the incessant images of destruction and scenes of despair. Clearly, the subtle hard-to-feel but actually impacting mesmerizing rhythmic structure, which is so characteristic of the passage as much as of the entire poem in one way or another thereby, is thus indeed so literally created through the steady influences of the stealth parallelism framed with the function-words-mediated, pace-controlling, rhythm-managing, and moodinfluencing verbal phrases, such as “there is” and “there were” along with the meaningfully “grouped” phonemes in the live verbal patterns that the phrases set in shape. The verbal phrases often appear quite naturally at the strategic initial or middle position of each line from the beginning to the end. The structure, at the same time, is also adjusted or fine-tuned for the impact of variety with the other less frequently appearing but equally important verbal

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phrases, such as the prepositional phrases headed by prepositions “among” and “amongst,” which also echoes in harmony with words, such as “mountain” and “muderacked” in ways as discussed above along with other verbal springs made by the repetition of “water” and “rock.” The measures for variety is also impacted with “here” and “there” intimately paired for rhythmic counteraction in addition to the use of conjunction “and” and indefinite article “a” to lead and piece together the repetition of drip and drop for the water dripping and dropping impact. With the mesmerizing impact so verbally arranged, the water dripping and dropping sounds would thus occur or echo as in the immeasurable space of void to “show” the emptiness of the real world. This simulated and simultaneously real and surreal verbal impact would also suggest quite subtly but emphatically how the echoing sounds of water could exist literally nowhere else but so vividly in the verbally stimulated imagination and how the real world is in fact so ironically devoid of it.44 Thus, in addition to its regular grammatical or lexical function, the “there is” verbal phrases do play the irreplaceable role in making the passage come out with such mesmerizing impact. Of a passage with a total of 270 words, the verbal phrases appear roughly ten times including its varied forms. The verbal phrases are used effectively along with other imbedded, equally narrativepace-fine-tuning, but more frequently appearing ones in ways, for instance, as so indicated in the beginning stanza. In the stanza, so effectively used are not only the parallelism built upon the prepositional phrases led by “after,” that is, “After the torchlight . . . / After the frosty silence . . . / After the agony . . .” but also the chiastic verbal pattern imbedded for ironical contrast “He who was living is . . . dead / We who were living are . . . dying / With a little patience.” The effect of parallelism created with the use of one “after” after another could, along with the coordination of “the” and “and,” including this part “The shouting and the crying / Prison and palace and reverberation” often suggests a weird sense of indifference toward whatever doomsday that may come and however much humanity must suffer or must quietly endure with one disaster after another. This suggested sense of indifference, however, could then equally suggest humanity’s imperishable virtue of patience in waiting and hoping for the best yet to come after the worst that comes first. The imperishable power of the tenacious faith that steadily sustains humanity therefore also thus reveals itself. Undoubtedly, in this live context of simultaneously sounds of despair-echoing and sounds of hope-resonating void in ways so characteristic of The Waste Land, even the most innocent use of commonplace words or regular passages could become such meaningful allusions probably beyond the best authorial intention in ways as much serendipitously emerging as “an unpremeditated and accidental [allusion]” as Montaigne’s “unpremeditated and accidental philosopher.”45 In this verbally stimulated allusion-enriching and allusion-enriched live context particularly of the last part of The Waste

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Land, whenever we come upon scenarios, such as “There is the empty chapel” with nothing else there but “Only a cock stood on the rooftree” whose cry seems to occasion or coincide with “a flash of lightning,” how could it ever be possible for us not to relate the scene to the famous line from Basho, that is, “A flash of lightning / Into the gloom / Goes the heron’s cry” in ways as discussed above, regardless of whether or how such “a flash of lightening” could be in any way related to a ray of hope as so evoked or even invoked in the live context in ways as the dry sterile thunderclaps might?46 Likewise, how could it also be possible, ever, for anyone who reads Japanese haikus not be instantly reminded of this haiku by Basho “The ancient pond / A frog jumps in—Sound of water” upon coming across the drip and drop sounds of water echoing in this part of the live context of The Waste Land, especially when the special visual or visualizable ripples of sound impact could so instantly be “heartfelt” as “the intermediary sensation” that evokes our innate power of imagination?47 Do we not possibly, in other words, also so instantly visualize the ripples of water so synaesthetically manifested as much as the otherwise invisible sound of waves and as the psychological impact so reminiscent of the flash of the lightening in an incessant silent motion or motionless motion in our minds along with Edvard Much’s “The Scream”? Would not the special impact of silence, sound of water, and even the simple reference to “cicada” in this line “Not the cicada / And dry grass singing / But sound of water over a rock” not even be enough for us to relate to Basho’s this haiku, be it as a parody or otherwise, that is, “In seclusion, silence / Shrilling into the mountain boulder, / The cicada’s rasp”48 even if not this one, as we discussed above, among other ones? In the text of The Waste Land, there are simply far too many meaning-enriching and sense-enlivening lingering echoes for us to catch alive from within the text as from across cultures, and from deep inside ourselves as “mon frère” or even as metamorphosized “jumping frog.” Would not hope thus also be possibly inherent there in the humanity’s at once textoccasioning and text-occasioned unique power of imagination or activity in making the creatively meaningful life-making allusions so suggestive of an utmost irreducibly innate life-affirming “paradoxical optimism” in this way even under the most humanity-distorting circumstance? HOPE IN THE PERFORMATIVE WORDS FROM FOREIGN TONGUES Ultimately, as previously referred to, the most revealing of the hidden message of hope, especially in terms of the ways it is delivered, is how the message is not to be captured from any logically stated proposition but rather

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often through the performative “nonsenses,” which are so scattered around in each part but appear quite “oddly” concentrated in the last stanza of the last part, especially as direct quotations from foreign literary texts. The use of direct quotations in the original foreign languages could indeed function as the sudden but much needed timely moments to jolt readers into pensive occasions of pauses for inspirations through such an indispensable impact of “linguistic alienation,” indeed, as Gareth Reeves points out, often “goes hand in hand with linguistic attraction” in The Waste Land because we could be as much “fascinated by what sounds strange” as by “what sounds familiar.”49 The use of direct quotations in this way would also thus provide readers the “intermediary sensation” through the original sound quality and verbal flavor, which could by no means be translated and therefore must be kept alive intact in the original inasmuch the same ways as the real flavor of arias are kept so authentically intact, that is, in the original Italian, German, and French, untranslated. Certainly, before we can literarily understand their verbal meanings through translation, it is still possible for us to appreciate the quotations in the original foreign tongues as performative nonsenses through our awakened “intermediary sensation” that may still possibly help make “sense.” Everything, in other words, would still make “sense” inasmuch the same way as we usually do with the arias sung in the original foreign tongues, which must be appreciated as much literally as part of the music itself in whatever the original languages as they would be sung. Therefore, as indicated at the very end of the last stanzas of the last part of The Waste Land, however as disparate as all these quotations might be in English, Lantin, French, and Sanskrit, they all appear so intimately stuck together in such an incongruously juxtaposed congruous cluster or mosaic jumble of sounds from discrete tongues; they form in this way a special version of chorus for the message of hope and peace delivered through their uniquely harmonious voices of a dissonantly hope-appealing accord. Undoubtedly, whether translated or not, these original quotations in foreign tongues, such as the ones at the end of last part of the poem’s, would often initially appear as if so arbitrarily pulled out of the original cultural. literary, and linguistic contexts only to fill in the empty lots left for the poem to be finally wrapped up with something of an exotic, cosmic, comic, or even a slight cynically playful mood of self-mockery. Regardless, these lines, all emerge in the end as unusual but subtly consorted message of hope not only in terms of their translated verbal messages or “ideas” and the original contexts that they each allude to but also in terms of the melodic sounds and “intermediary sensation” they each arouse; they all suggest in this way the cyclic sense of hope that would never be easily explained away as “meaningless” nursey lullaby or be taken so much for granted as “meaningful” lines from lofty classical literary texts. Indeed, in the live context of The Waste

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Land, as discussed above, no verbal or phonemic elements that make the text should be as arbitrarily differentiated at any time as “meaningful” content words or “meaningless” function words or phonemes if we do truly want to make sense of the poem holistically as a whole. If so, neither should any quotation or allusion be so treated, be it translated or in the foreign original, whether it makes some sense or sounds utterly nonsensical. In the live context of The Waste Land, all the original quotations have already emerged as the fully integrated parts of the text; they all appear so significantly enlivening the text that enlivens them, especially in terms of the lines that make up the last stanza in five language, English, Latin, Italian, French, and Sanskrit including English spoken at the Shakespearean era. In this context made of these allusions in different tongues, if this otherwise so nonsensical sounding or meaninglessly meaningful nursery rhyme of “London Bridge Is Falling Down” still remains as popular as a heart-nourishing, soul-soothing, and even spirit-uplifting tune since the Medieval times, so should the message of hope inherent in it remain in our heart as much as reality-defying, spirit-uplifting, and life-affirming. The message of hope could even often sound so imperishably alive from within as from without in spite of the scenarios of the utmost absurdity or even when life could appear as hopelessly or helplessly bleak as an unending process of torture, as ever, as before, be it with such a huge rock that we have to push so endlessly uphill or be it with so many “miles to go before [we can finally] sleep.” Even if just temporarily, how could we not be uplifted a bit by this light-hearted chanting of the falling London Bridge, which could bring us as many sweet memories of our childhood? How could we not even be brought back to our mothers’ sweet rhythmic breath, singing, and soulcaressing heartbeats that we have become so familiar with both before and after we are born as fetuses and then as infants? How would it not thus possibly make us all feel “born again,” regarding the actual function of the text, a posteriori, particularly in a sense of “satori” or “a leap of faith,” however temporarily, certainly in ways so contrary to any skeptical view, which could arise on occasions as naturally from the process of reading the poem itself as from Nicodemus? How would it not be possible for the conspicuous message of despair to become so serendipitously transformed into the miracle-making vehicle for the message of hope hidden in the text of The Waste Land known for its “blasphemous” scenes of debauchery and “image of destruction”? With the nonsensical sounding lullaby leading the way or lending meanings to the foreign quotations in the concluding cluster, does not everything then start to make some sense? While it may not make much sense at all in terms of “idea” or logic, it however does make so much sense in this way with all the “intermediary sensations” that the lullaby may so immediately arouse or convey from within us as from across the cultures given all those who listen

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to it with their own truly awakened “intermediary sensation.” For all of us who survive through our childhood in this not so easy to survive world of ours, this nonsensical nursery rhythm could indeed make so much sense to us, perhaps, as immeasurably so much sense in ways more than we could ever possibly make sense of. The lullaby’s centuries-long popularity speaks as much for its innate and enduring life, value and power; the sound message of the lullaby sustains and convey our tenacious hope for a life that would survive all adversaries imaginable as Carl Sandburg may so suggest in the poem of “Chicago.” So is the message of hope tenaciously there from within the line of Dante’s Purgatorio, “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina,” which could be read as “Then he hid himself in the fire that refines him.” Be it understood literally or figuratively, as the case with the Fire Sermon, there certainly is also the message of hope behind and beneath everything the line suggests not only in terms of the overall message or theme of the Divine Comedy itself but also in line with the message of fire that we also grow familiar with through the Fire Sermon. In the live context of The Waste Land, fire could certainly mean reincarnation through the agency of fire, along with rain and air, etc. as it is thus promised in the Upanishads with fire as the indispensable mediation and reincarnation as a special form of resurrection. However, fire could also mean at the same time absolute freedom from the incessant cycle of reincarnation or rebirth because, as it is also thus indicated in Fire Sermon, fire burns out everything and itself through everything it burns itself with for the ultimate freedom out of the incessant cycle of life. Freedom then means to be completely “beyond good and evil,” that is, so devoid of attachment in the utmost “state of being” of void. How could not freedom then also mean the state of being with “complete simplicity” for “the fire and the rose [becoming] one”? Indeed, if not until everything is so thoroughly burned, everything will still thus remain burning and “[b]urning with the fire of lust, with the fire of hate, with the fire of delusion. I say it is burning with birth, aging and death, with sorrows, with lamentations, with pains, with griefs, with despairs.”50 Until everything is thus burned out, “[one] finds estrangement in the body . . . in tangibles,”51 which means one would be detached for becoming “estranged” from everything one remains attached to the moment one is born into life. “When he finds estrangement, passion fades out. With the fading of passion, he is liberated. When liberated, there is knowledge that he is liberated. He understands: ‘Birth is exhausted, the holy life has been lived out, what can be done is done, of this there is no more beyond’”52 One is therefore in this pure state of being liberated or free from any form of attachment even in the disguise of detachment. This is then the scenario, as Eliot thus concludes in Four Quartets, “There are three conditions” of attachments, “which often look alike,” however much they may

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“differ completely” but “flourish in the same hedgerow” as “[a]ttachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment / From self and from things and from persons” (FQ IV, iii). The same message of hope is also there inherent in the line from the Latin poem Pervigilium Veneris “Quando fiam uti chelidon,” which means “When shall I become like a swallow.” The message, however, is inherent not just in the message itself but in the very image that carries message with. Indeed, “Hope,” as Emily Dickinson may thus put it, “is the thing with feathers”53 and could be “sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—And sore must be the storm— / That could abash the little Bird / That kept so many warm—.”54 Hope, however, could also be a bird, a seagull, or a swallow, which does not simply fly away; it flies up, soaring, and transcending the miseries in the world in ways as El Greco’s “Christ on the Cross with Landscape” may so suggest. Indeed, with its graphically attention-grabbing image, the message of hope is even suggested in El Greco’s otherwise utterly morbid painting, which could seem to indicate anything else but hope at the first glimpse. With the cross appearing less visible amidst the stormy dark background, against which Jesus’s pale-colored stiff human body automatically stands out in sharp contrast as a focal point. The shape of the body and arms appear so stiffened out suggesting more of a straight vertical line than the softly elongated and gently curved one as in many same type of paintings of the same period, especially in terms of the parts of the torso and the arms, which are not as gently curved or raised upward, as usual, either. Everything of the “body language” suggests tension with the body literally formed into a tension-suggesting V-shape particularly with the tightly upward-lifted arms. Even if the elongated body still appears carrying the clear signs of influences from the early Renaissance style especial with the elongated body still somewhat gently carved, the image of Jesus emerges quite realistic rather than merely symbolic in contrast with many on the same subject of the same period; the texture and tone of the muscles in particular could indeed make one think of nothing else but “the cold and stiff corpse.” With the consistent use of the dominantly cold and dark colors along with the out-straightened lines of the torso and the tension-suggesting V-shaped upwardly outstretched arms, the piece emphasizes how the scene of death is morbid, horrifying, and real not merely, as usual, symbolic, even with Jesus. The piece apparently drives home how the horror of crucifixion with a real pale, cold, and stiffened corpse hung high up there amidst a dark storm. If so, what is the purpose for an artist to emphasize the fact known to everyone how death is terrible and real and then makes his work a meaningful one just in this way? Obviously not, while emphasizing the horrible death, this piece is also trying to reveal emphatically something as so “essential but invisible” as the indispensable life-sustaining air, that is “hope” or the message of ultimate triumph or salvation. How? With everything so depicted

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in this way especially the pose of the body, do we not possibly also see the image of a flying bird, a seagull, or a swallow soaring high against dark background transcending or triumphing over the storm? The message delivered or emphasized is therefore how the body is dead but the “soul” flies off upward, no matter how the world could possibly be as terrible as hell. 55 The symbolism and realism, death and life, ugliness and beauty, defeat and triumph all thus become so reconciled or reconcilable in the piece, which is in so many ways quite reminiscent in this regard of Peter Paul Rubens’s iconic “Christ on the Cross,” even if Rubens’s could be a further brutally realistic depiction of crucifixion.56 Likewise, the line from Gérard de Nerval’s “El Desdichado” does not only depict despair but also suggest tenacious hope that even asserts itself in the form of delirium; it indicates how despair and hope always remain as inseparable as real “mon semblable,—mon frère!” of each other because one could not be without the other. While crying over the loss of his estate and his lover, the unhappy knight in the poem defies his destiny still hoping to regain his “paradise lost”; he is thus as much in delirium as Nerval himself who literally composed the poem while remaining confined in an asylum. On behalf not only of itself but also of the poem as a whole, the quoted line certainly further suggests, quite remarkably, how the sonnet, from the second line of which the quoted line is drawn, could even appear to make a parody of itself, especially in terms of how the anecdotes of mythologies and personal experiences are so inimitably mixed up in the exquisite form of sonnet. In this regard, with everything appearing so intimately integrated into the exquisite form of sonnet, the poem seems to suggest in such a natural way how things that would otherwise remain as utterly incompatible are as much one natural pair of “strange bedfellow” as Queequeg and Ishmael or as the real “mon semblable,—mon frère” to each other, however much painstakingly as everything would so often differentiated as despair and hope as “the fire and the rose.” In this way, with the message of despair and hope appearing so readily adaptable and reversible with each other, this exquisite sonnet by Nerval could indeed even become the exquisite parody or mini version of The Waste Land. par excellence, especially in terms of the structural compatibility that it bears with The Waste Land. If each line of Nerval’s poem, especially in the last stanza, could be read as jumbled together with discrete or different stories or allusions as for a special museum exhibition, is it not the same “museum effect” be truly in effect with the concluding lines of The Waste Land? Even so, still as the case with Nerval’s poem, everything in The Waste Land at this moment also appears as much naturally intertwined as imaginable, however, not by any special “means of logic” but by the pure logic of emotion and imagination through the immediate mediation of the “intermediary sensation” as if in a special “the form, the pattern” of words, which can make words or

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music as alive as a Chinese jar in a perpetual mode of motionless motion of timely timelessness. In this case, it is “the form, the pattern” of sound so naturally inherent in the foreign tongue of French that subtly makes the difference because “the form, the pattern” of the sounds indeed have as much “an affair,” first and foremost, with “sound” and thus with poetry as “the first language”; it is therefore not, in other words, as so much in close “affinities” with ideas and thus with writing in the first place because writing is not as primary as sound in making poetry as “the first language” of humanity at least in ways as Herder so argues. In this regard, once again, as Foucault would also thus put it, “the form, the pattern” of sounds so explored in Nerval’s piece as in The Waste Land and certainly as in Four Quartets would then make it possible, even if just momentarily, for us to break free from the “purely grammatical” or the “formal elements, grouped together into a system” in “the order of things” preset for ideas and discourse, which would then so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not that of representation.”57 With the line quoted directly from the French original in this way, everything that would otherwise so arbitrarily “impose upon the sounds, syllables, and roots an organization that is not of representation” would then, in other words, be smoothly turned, even if just for a short while, into “the form, and pattern” of sounds, which is explored primarily to arouse the sensemaking “intermediary sensation” in the text of The Waste Land as in the original French context. Therefore, with this particular case by Nerval in mind, it would be probably further likely for us to imagine the reason and impact that Eliot might intend with all these lines quoted so directly from the otherwise discrete cultural and linguistic contexts in such intensity at the last stanza of The Waste Land. Would not the scenario be possibly like with all people saying “Thank you” in different tongues with different overflowing emotions at the same time or in rapid succession one after another? What would be the impact or the meaning of the scene then? So timely, here is also the message of hope inherent in the line “These fragments I have shored against my ruins Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe” from Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, which certainly suggests a tenacious spirit of “can doism” to carry on with life in whatever possibly compromised form or however utterly impossible to do so as it might thus appear even in any compromised form. In this regard, there is certainly a future there in The Spanish Tragedy as in Hamlet as long as there is enough cunningness, courage, patience and “method in madness” to carry things through, even if the future in Spanish Tragedy as in Hamlet could be merely something of a parody each in its own way of the original or the utterly unduplicable. The future could probably, in other words, neither as much bloody nor as much splendid as before as it would be in ways somewhat personified

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or promised even by the obviously lesser heroic or charismatic successors, such as the Stoic philosopher Horatio as in Hamlet, which turns out so ironically as a more famous “parody” of the original The Spanish Tragedy out of the circle of University Wits. Indeed, at this point, it would be so hard not to recall once again how often everything in the world does often “appear . . . twice” in ways as “Hegel remarks somewhere,” be they perceived as “all great world-historic facts and personages” but with “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce,” as Marx so adds.58 Even so, future still means hope in whichever way to be judged. Ultimately, the message of hope culminates in the echoes of thunderclaps, which suggests, as previously discussed, the indispensable life-saving, hope-salvaging, and energy-renewing virtues and power of “restraint, discipline, and compassion.” HOPE IN THE VOID OF MELTING POT OF ALLUSIONS AS PERFORMATIVE “ASIDES” With such a jumble of allusions so lumbered up in the poem, the text indeed becomes a meaningful void of melting pot. By void, it certainly means unlimited space for infinite interpretation as regards the immeasurable “riches” of meanings yet to be sorted out or performatively created out of sheer chaos, as the word of creation to be so defined previously in the preface with reference to the creation narratives that we are all familiar with, such as Genesis. Therefore, referring at once to the popular nursery rhythm, the lofty lines from Dante’s Divine Comedy or other classics, such as Nerval’s sonnet “El Desdichado” that asserts hope even in colorful delirium, Kyd’s popular Elizabethan “revenge play,” and the thunderclaps sounding lines from the Upanishads, this cluster of mixed quotations suggests resonantly in discord the tenacious power of hope despite or against misery and despair. Hope therefore could remain hidden but alive with the fragments of thoughts as “Dao is in the piss and shit.” Hope would be in the fragments of thoughts as much as in the fragments of nonsenses before they could be sufficiently made sense of in the context. Juxtaposed as if to piece up hope otherwise so scattered around in the text, the fragments of thoughts or nonsenses all suggest how indestructible or irreducible hope is. As the case with The Waste Land, hope would always thus remain hidden in anything as much trivial and nonsensically “meaningful” as the nursery rhythm of the falling London Bridge. be it hummed for infants or by adults. In the context of The Waste Land, these direct quotations in the foreign tongues as in English could really be as much ambiguous as truth-revealing theatrical “asides” at the same time often in ways so compatible with this particular lines about where Fisher King is and under what circumstances he may still find himself from both within and without.

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Indeed, together with the direct quotations in foreign tongues as special “asides,” what becomes of the Fisher King as regards his state of mind and state of being would emerge further inferable from the line “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Even if the Fisher King does not have as much energy or motivation as Tennyson’s Ulysses does “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield,” he may still have Parsifal as Hamlet has Horatio to leave behind him a perceivable future. These lines are thus also like “asides” that speak his mind as it still cherishes hope, however otherwise the handicapped king might look contrary especially in terms of the question he so ambiguously asks, that is, “Shall I at least set my lands in order?” Once again, how should we then read his mind by means of adequately interpreting this question? Should we interpret it, as usual, a “rhetorical question”? If so, it means the king knows emphatically it is a mission utterly impossible. Should we then take it as a real question? If so, the question could immediately indicate in an urgent sense as regards whether it is even possible at all for the king himself to know whether it is a mission impossible or not in the first place. The question would thus indicate how desperate it is for anyone, such as Fisher King, even try to know the utterly unknowable, let alone to do anything about it. The question could then suggest a further embroiling scenario with doubt, concern, determination, frustration, or resignation. With all these possibly suggested or suggestible ambiguities, the question also thus reveals, as Wittgenstein himself would concede here, whether, after all, in such a live context of The Waste Land, we can still differentiate nonsenses from meaningful propositions; it means whether it is still possible for us to express ourselves by means of making answerable questions through all the available rational means that make our common language function as common language, such as syntax and logic, without also taking into consideration of the influences of sounds that simultaneously enliven our “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination” that enlivens it? In this regard, however as much ambiguous as these scenarios could possibly be, with the lines adequately taken as “asides,” they could be equally truth-revealing at the same time to make it possible for us to penetrate into whatever ambiguously embroiling circumstances. As such “asides,” the cluster of direct quotations in the original foreign tongues and in English could become the crucial sources for the “performative nonsenses” to deliver or arouse “intermediary sensation” that could often sound as much meaninglessly meaningful as resonantly discordant; they would become, in other words, the special kind of nonsenses not because of any idea that they are supposedly in close affinity with but rather because of the sounds that they each carry and arouse meaning-suggesting “intermediary sensation” or “auditory imagination.”

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Therefore, however possibly these direct quotations in foreign tongues as in English would often remain nonsensical until they could be adequately made sense of, if ever, in terms of the ideas that they are as assumed in close affinity with a translatable form of writing, they could, however, only remain as much as meaningfully performative and nonsensical as the nursery rhythm of the “London Bridge.” As meaning-making “performative nonsenses,” these quotations in the context of The Waste Land would still make as much sense as the arias sung in the original foreign tongues with their original flavor or the inherent intermediary sensation kept intact, not in any way compromised as it otherwise would be once sung in the tongue other than the original Italian, German, or French. If the “intermediary sensation” is literarily part of operatic music itself, so are the sounds as much the integral and intimate meaning-making elements of the quotations in foreign tongues as in English so indispensable for us to capture “the primitive wisdom” inherent in poetry as the “first language.” Therefore, the “meaning” or the crucial part of the meaning would be irretrievably compromised, that is, at the inevitable cost of sound, once translated for the compatible sensemaking ideas or concepts. Indeed, even if Blitz could be translated in English as “lightening,” the English equivalent is still by no means “a word. . . that gives the ear, with the help of an intermediary sensation, the feeling of sadness and rapidity which the eye had of lightening” in ways as Herder believes that one could instantly feel in German. The word Blitz, according to Herder, suggests, as in German, the original flavor reminiscent of poetry as the “first language,” which is, indeed, once again, in Herder’s own words, a kind of “eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie?”—A Dictionary of the Soul, at once mythology and the wondrous epic of the actions and voices of all being!” Could not this practice by Eliot of keeping in The Waste Land the original sounds as the essential and integral part of “meanings” as much possible even as a special kind of “performative nonsenses” before any possible translation later, if ever, certainly not necessary for those fluent in the foreign tongues? Does not this practice also suggest how Eliot is very much a natural part of “the Romantic quest for purity” or “for original deviation” as what “Pound’s generation inherited” in ways as Kenner so indicated?59 ECHOES OF HOPE THROUGH ECHOES OF FOREIGN WORDS This scenario could even be further understood in terms of readers’ own compatible experiences with foreign poems, such as Paul Verlaine’s “Il pleure dans mon coeur” and Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied.” Here is the poem by Verlaine, “Il pleure dans mon coeur / Comme il pleut sur la ville; / Quelle est

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cette langueur / Qui pénètre mon coeur ? / Ô bruit doux de la pluie / Par terre et sur les toits ! / Pour un coeur qui s’ennuie, / Ô le chant de la pluie ! / Il pleure sans raison / Dans ce coeur qui s’écoeure. / Quoi ! nulle trahison ? / Ce deuil est sans raison. / C’est bien la pire peine / De ne savoir pourquoi / Sans amour et sans haine / Mon coeur a tant de peine!” Initially, the well-known piece, for instance, may not seem to make much sense especially in terms of all its recurrent repetition of a few words, such as “coeur” and “pluie,” in such a way as if the overall poem is designed only for such a nonsensical recurrences of words and the ways they sound. However, this seemingly monotonous nonsensical sounding verbal flow, in fact, conveys as much meaning-suggesting “intermediary sensation” as the nonsensical nursery lullaby of London Bridge. Like the lullaby, the seemingly incessant recurring verbal flows with such repetition of the nonsensical sounds deliver the unpremeditated life-affirming messages of hope directly from heart, to the heart, and for the heart in ways otherwise utterly impossible. The verbal recurrence so characteristic of the poem therefore expresses the meaninglessly meaningful meaning with the sound-evoked “intermediary sensation” that conveys vividly the otherwise utterly unutterable meaning of feeling, such as ennui. What the poem so expressed, in other words, is by no means something readily expressible with whatever our rational proposition-making means available in the “common language,” which is, as Wittgenstein so emphasizes, not designed at all for the expression of anything other than “common,” that is, anything with utterly unutterable nuances as regards any “private sensation,” such as pains, toothaches, or colors. This is probably why in text of The Waste Land all these quotations related with hope-suggesting utmost “private” emotions remain intact in the original foreign tongues as the major part of “performative nonsenses” that makes up the text of The Waste Land. Does it not also mean that all these quotations, other than their utmost untranslatability, are also left for the purpose to let the audience who are not good at the original tongues have an authentic “feel” of the special meaning-suggesting “intermediary sensation” as with arias sung in the original tongues? Does it not also mean, in other words, it is thus left for us to “catch” what Wittgenstein calls the indispensable “atmospheric” meaning-accompanying sense before audience can possibly get some relevant ideas or meanings through translation? The most profound “intermediary sensation,” which makes the most essential part of the original languages, however, is apparently often not translatable. As discussed above, this could also be the case with E. E. Cummings, who tries so hard with his “bizarre” measures to let readers instantly feel the “intermediary sensation” of meaning through the audial and visual experiences before or at the same time when they could get the ideas of the meaning. After all, the cluster of the “performative nonsenses” used in the last part could certainly also be understood in

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one way or another in terms of the ideas of the meaning by means of translation, but the ideas-suggesting and atmospherically sensemaking “intermediary sensation” so evoked or invoked through the sounds is inherent only in the original languages and therefore must be savored only with the original tongues. Indeed, even in the little piece of pure beauty, such as Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied” as below, the unique “intermediary sensation” could also be savored through the pure verbal flow particularly through the indispensable mediation of the seemingly insignificant function words, such as “über,” “im,” “du,” “auch,” particularly the ways they each sound in context. Apparently, in the live context, the function words provide so timely the key support in rhythmically activating the crucial syntactic-prosodic verbal pattern; they, in other words, enliven each content word in this way at the crucial vantage positions regarding where and how things truly are and will soon be thereafter with a special “atmospheric” kind of “intermediary sensation.” Here is the poem. Über allen Gipfeln lst Ruh’ (On all the hilltops there is peace), / In allen Wipfeln Spürest du (In all the treetops you feel) / Kaum eine Hauch (Hardly any breeze); / Die Vöglein schweigen im Walde (The birds are quiet in the woods). / Warte nur! balde (Just wait, soon) / Ruhest du auch (You too will be in peace). Indeed, whatever poetic impact as this little masterpiece may so suggest, everything of the poem is so much contingent upon the indispensable but “quiet” support of the function words in this poem by means of the very sound quality they each embody. Literally, the poem’s immeasurable impact of a special “museum effect” with synesthetic subtlety could be identified prosodically in line with “auch,” the last word of the last line. This crucial last line seems to suggest how everything may finally quiet down inasmuch the same way as the “h-sounding” word auch may so suggest especially in accordance with the metric pattern of the poem where the words with soothing vowel and consonant sounds all come in resonant chords of echoes, such as “Ruh,” “Spurest,” “Ruhest,” “du,” “hauch,” and “auch.” The function words here also carry the meaning-enriching and beauty-enlivening vowels and consonant sounds that sustain and echo with the metric pattern of the piece in addition to the consistent and coherent hushing effect of the poem mediated through them especially in ways exemplified by the last two words “du” and “auch.” Of the amount of twenty-four words that make up the poem, the six function words literally emerge as the crucial relay points where rhythmic pause and stress occur right at the moment in making the little piece a lyric marvel for the unusual visual and audial pleasure aesthetically. The poem thus enables us to hear and see simultaneously how silence may ultimately overtake the whole universe. No doubt, in this poem we can hear and see as much silence and peace as in Basho’s frog poem by simply staying attuned to the hushing effect of sound as flowing with the momentary

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slight sound of water. In this regard, Goethe’s “Wandrers Nachtlied” sums up everything of the universe in silence, in motion, and in stillness. The poem does not “dissolve, diffuse, and dissipate” but “re-creates”60 everything as if of an instant Zen moment; it reconciles afresh everything of the universe otherwise utterly irreconcilable in a pure spirit of “Dasein” of “Ding an sich.” HOPE IN THE IRREDUCIBLE SIMPLE MESSAGE THROUGH THE INFINITELY VARIABLE SCOPES Certainly, all these allusions in original foreign languages would often emerge as so indispensable for mutual illumination on whatever vital blind spots hidden in the text even as the most deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies. Indeed, while in the process of trying hard to understand The Waster Land, soon or later, the question would pop out as regards what might be the conceivable benefits from such a modernist narrative that we try so hard to understand. We must then try to be clear with ourselves as to whether or how it would be possible for us to deepen our understanding of such a modernist text itself the way The Waste Land is. On the one hand, this modernist narrative obviously often reveals an intricate void-conscious tenacious human effort for the grasp of the ultimate meaning of humanity as “the ungraspable phantom of life” particularly in terms of its destiny-dependent treacherous trajectories of innumerous capricious courses. On the other hand, this tenacious effort also simultaneously suggests the inevitable limit or poverty of perspectives inherent in the effort itself as much an infinite array of possibilities for the exact same reason. Often this effort may appear to succeed only in revealing sheer cases of despair one after another as at the first glance of The Waste Land. Even so, the effort, as effort, also inevitably suggests hope, without which how could there even be any such an effort in the first place? Would it ever be possible, in other word, for anyone so motivated to set out searching for nothing but despair in the first place? Furthermore, however often it may appear otherwise, neither should such an effort be possibly identified as or with any rational means that would actually empower long enough anyone, such as Fisher King, to “set [his] lands in order.” Any effort empowered by mere rational means, in other words, would likely only end up further emphasizing the tenacious message of hope as deliverable by no other means possible but the simple inspired recognition of how truly fire and rose are ultimately the same as the precise “divine voice that respects the triad of ‘restraint, honesty and compassion’” from the echoing thunderclaps of “Da, Da, Da.”61 Indeed, in The Waste Land as in The Gulliver’s Travels, all kinds of perspectives have been explored through the same type of constantly metamorphosized single performative protagonist to show the validity and variety

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of different perspectives. The exploration however only ends up revealing no particular preference of any perspective but rather the overall poverty of all perspectives explored due to the vital flaws so reflective of all kinds of follies and vices so characteristic of humanity in one way or another, such as Lilliputian’s fuss-making intelligence, Brobdingnagian’s excessive naivety, and Laputan’s unduly mental complexity, among others, especially in contrast with the Yahoos-subduing power of “complete simplicity” that so characterizes Houyhnhnm’s “benign intelligence.” However, the ultimate question is how it would ever be possible for all these problems of excess and deficiency that cause humanity’s flawed perspectives to give away eventually to the irreducible Yahoo-subduing and humanity-sustaining “benign intelligence” with all its holistic power of “complete simplicity”; it is indeed an issue that is not readily explainable by any rational means but still remains, regardless, as much tenaciously alive as the utmost irreducible and tenaciously simple message of hope. Such a “complete simplicity” is undoubtedly so forever deep-rooted in and alive with the primitive-wisdom-carrying and delivering “intermediary sensation” as it is so inherent in humanity itself; it is not likely, ever, to be strangled by any hierarchically set dichotomic all pigeonholed system of values because it is so far above and beyond any cliché of “good and evil.” The simple message of hope would certainly remain as tenaciously real and irreducibly powerful in sustaining whatever complex rational perspectives however likely they would sooner or later culminate in “complete simplicity” in the end as if through the very agency of the irreducible simplicity of hope so tenaciously inherent in humanity per se in ways as it is so suggested in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets. This utmost simple humanity-sustaining hope would certainly, in other words, make the otherwise utterly impossible “reconcilement to Yahoo-kind in general” appear ultimately “not so difficult” to handle for Lemuel Gulliver.62 Neither would it ever appear so undoable for us to obtain the utterly irreducible simple humanity-sustaining and life-affirming message of hope, which could even be so ironically inherent in the “intermediary sensation”-arousing nonsensical sounds of “London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down” as much as remaining alive and hidden in the tongue-twisting lines in Sanskrit “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. / Shantih shantih shantih.” Obviously, in this regard, The Waste Land would also mean as much poverty as power as regards our available means in understanding life and humanity itself contingent upon how it would be read in terms of the infinitely variable perspectives so naturally inherent and yet still so often remaining hidden in its text; it depends on, in other words, how we can actually read in terms of the mind-enriching perspectives hidden in the text by readily turning everything around and across any set categories that differentiate

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“the fire and the rose” inasmuch the same way as in defining the “meaningful” content words and “meaningless” function words. Sometimes, however, to capture the truth of meaning from the live context of The Waste Land in this regard could take no more than one instant; it means that one who is capable of doing it must have as much a special “instinct” or “knack” as that Stephan Toulmin says of Cook Ding’s of the Zhuangzi. Once again, for Toulmin, indeed, just like the geologist’s on-the-spot or in-the-field “knack” that his teacher Wittgenstein specifically referred to in an actual on-site training class, Cook Ding’s “great knowledge is not perception that measures and categorizes” but his acute mind that “tries to use what cannot be measured in an entirely practical way,”63 nor does it necessarily suggest anything like “a magic eye able to penetrate something ordinary minds cannot apprehend” but only something hard to describe but is truly working, “something perfectly ordinary, empirical, and quasi-aesthetic in the way it works” as “it is the same with doctors and sailors: some cases do not ‘smell right.’”64 Likewise, for the understanding of the simple truth of meaning inherent in the intermediary sensation-conveying performative nonsensical lines, such as “London Bridge is falling down falling down,” no matter how much we might have tried in search of an adequate rationalistic account of it, still, it is often to no avail for reasons, again, as Edmund Burke would so often remind us of even from so many years ago. Does not Burke so persuasively argue how “Men often act right from their feelings [to stimulation, such as from verbal music], who afterwards reason but ill on them from principle; but as it is impossible to avoid an attempt at such reasoning”?65 Similarly, while dealing with the live text of The Waste Land, we must also, once again, listen to William James, as he so emphasizes in Radical Empiricism, how when to acquire the “immediate feeling” or our direct experience with the true rhythms of life, we should take these little things, such as “the conjunctions,” as seriously “as primordial elements of ‘fact’ . . . the distinctions and disjunctions.”66 He explains how and why we should pay attention to things that appear as trivial or insignificant as “prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions, ‘is,’ ‘isn’t,’ ‘then,’ ‘before,’ ‘in,’ ‘on,’ ‘beside,’ ‘between,’ ‘next,’ ‘like,’ ‘unlike,’ ‘as,’ ‘but’”67; it is because, like the reliable “intermediary sensation” conveying vehicles, these function words “compenetrate harmoniously” to make it possible for us to understand how life may “flow out of the stream of pure experience, the stream of concretes or the sensational stream, as naturally as nouns and adjectives do, and . . . melt into it again as fluidly when we apply [the function words] to a new portion of the stream.”68 Indeed, such contextualized experience that could be so “radically” detailed through the indispensable mediation of function words in the worded world with “complete simplicity” seems to suggest how everything of our

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text-making verbal elements will be eventually equalized or be made equal in the actual context along with or through our elevated conscious. The life of consciousness thus depends so much on these verbally categorized or expressible experiences not only as meaning but also as meaningmaking flow of verbal music through the rhythmic flow of words. As the case with “rock and road” of the second stanza discussed above, mediated by the crucial function words, such as “and,” these repetitive verbal flows literally activate or enliven one another with whatever verbal and phonetic qualities dormant in themselves, a posteriori; they enrich one another and thus the meaning of the text, ad infinitum, through the intimate textually constructed specific verbal relations in adjacency, contiguity, or contextuality regardless of the usual sets of hierarchy upon “parts of speech” a priori. To understand the meaning in the text of The Waste Land, we must therefore try to understand it as specifically as possible in terms of where, when, in what mood, under what circumstance, and by what specific means it means. Such an approach is necessary because, as The Waste Land so indicates with all its often nonsensical sounding but infinitely meaning-enriching power of “intermediary sensation” of poetry as “the first language” of the utmost primordial human experiences, humanity could no longer be easily or readily categorized, that is, to be simply tied up, as usual, as before, to any specific type of rational means. Even so, hope is still there, tenaciously there for us to grasp it by means of our alerted consciousness or “knack” with “complete simplicity” that truly works. Reading The Waste Land would thus indeed be such a rationally inspired “irrational” effort, which reveals the poverty of our available rational perspectives but at the same time indicates the inexhaustible richness of any possible perspective still available to us. This richness could certainly be grasped on occasions in a split second due to our awareness of the truth of meaning, which could be so inherent as much in nonsenses as in any rationally prepared proposition; it would be particularly the case as we become increasingly aware of how everything of The Waste Land could be so widely or variably around and across any rationally or arbitrarily set boundary. This scenario should therefore explain the actual and potential presence and power of allusions in the context of The Waste Land because all the allusions always promise the rich opportunities for us to grope and grasp for meanings, which could even be so abundantly inherent in any single item as much as in any group of items. This is always the case no matter how all these allusions would otherwise appear not only so hard to understand but also equally so hard even to pinpoint in the intricate live context the way The Waste Land is. The allusions in The Waste Land would thus, in other words, allow us to access them as if they were so on exhibition with such a holistic “museum effect” in a museum of real life. To appreciate them, it

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does not require any rationale to have them first “dissolve[[ed], diffuse[ed], dissipate[ed]” as we then “struggle[ ] to idealize and to unify” everything about them “in order to re-create”69 something new out of them; instead, they simply want us to appreciate them as what they each really are in ways as the live text of The Waste Land may so suggest to us as readers. This phenomenon explains how modernism is the ultimate rational means to examine humanity, or in Nietzsche’s term, “reevaluate all evaluations,” by placing humanity under whatever conceivable conditions or circumstances from whatever variable perspectives. Often, the perspectives that Nietzsche would invite us to reevaluate everything afresh by means of going so consciously through and “beyond good and evil” could make a speed boat appear as in a movie like a bullet flashing by, in slow motion, or simply as a motionless spot on the farthest end of horizon. This motionless tiny spot, as we may imagine, could even be extended as if infinitely into itself there in ways as Russian babushka dolls may so suggest. The tiny dot could be in theory so infinitely extended into an immeasurably deep abyss so impossible even for Zeno’s famous flying arrow, which instead could likely appear so perpetually suspended over there as motionless in motion as if upon “a still fixed point of the turning world” (FQ I. iii) as “a Chinese jar [that] Still / Moves perpetually in its stillness” (FQ I, v). With its immeasurably void granted for whatever perspective-guaranteeing variable leeway, The Waste Land subjects humanity of all walks of life to such examination or reevaluation from the ordinary to the legendary as much as from present to the past; it examines the living as much as the dead; it places under scrutiny the famous as well the ignoble; it revaluates all our means of evaluation as regards whether, how, or how much, in the wild and open laboratory of the wasteland from both within and without, humanity could still remain as humanity even when one could eat without caring about the taste, love without passion, and have sex without desire. Thus, with the lenses readily adjusted in terms of distance for the variable and timely adjustable perspectives or the best possible viewpoints by drawing scenes from far to near as from past to present or vice versa, the dead in the live context of The Waste Land would appear resurrected or reincarnated with newly assigned life mission, whereas the living would eventually emerge as if dead a long time ago or simply remains “neither Living nor dead” (WL I, i). Indeed, while the legendary, such as Fisher King, would appear as much hopelessly or helplessly hanging there to life as the ignoble clerks, all “the unreal cities,” be they called Athens, Rome, Carthage, would also appear as much real as the city of London that appears decaying and dying. With the modernist narrative that makes swiftly switching, crisscrossing, or instantly flip-flopping views from one scene to another in ways so montage-like across any conceivable boundaries of time and space, history and reality so

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displayed in the context of The Waste Land would often become simultaneously fast forward as much as quickly rewinding. The whole world would also be shifted in slow motion or move to a simple occasion of pensive pause or an intense self-conscious recollecting moment of kairos from chronos, that is, the mere succession of time. Indeed, with the narrative distance appearing as readily or flexibly adjustable as the lenses of telescope and microscope along with contextspecific metamorphosis of the chameleon-like single protagonist, humanity would appear thoroughly screened in the deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies. Humanity would appear, in other words, as readily examined as possible regardless of whether it is during the time “When the evening [could] spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” or when “A rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I [as Fisher King] was fishing in the dull canal” (WL IV, ii). Indeed, humanity could be thus placed variably under scrutiny in The Waste Land as elsewhere at any moment be it “[b] efore the urban dawn wind unresisting . . .in the waning dusk” (FQ IV, ii) or when humanity may so surreptitiously emerge from the past with “[t\he eyes of a familiar compound ghost / Both intimate and unidentifiable.” (FQ III, ii). As a poem, The Waste Land indeed testifies how “Hence, once again, the Poems Including History, their inclusiveness, their paradoxical optimism.”70 In this regard, humanity appears quite thoroughly examined or revaluated in The Waste Land in almost as much the same way as in The Gulliver’s Travels through the adjustable lenses and ranges of various telescopes and microscopes that make the Gulliver himself, under variable circumstances, become or at least be so perceived as one of the Lilliputians, Brobdingnagians, and Yahoos whom he encounters and tries to understand among so many others. Does not the chameleon-like single protagonist go through so many metamorphosized roles in reevaluating everything so essential of humanity in the modern era as Gulliver’s does his part in the eighteenth century? CONCLUSION: THE WASTE LAND AS IRREPLACEABLE NEXUS OF ELIOT’S POETIC WORLD Indeed, this tenacious nature of hope appears to be so steadily confirmed in the last part when all the descriptions become more and more distinct with as much utmost unambiguous simplicity as the sounds or echoes of dry and sterile thunderclap of “Da, Da, Da.” These sounds of thunderclaps deliver a clear-cut simple message of hope as “the same triads—restraint, honesty, and compassion” in ways so compatible with the simple concluding

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statement that asserts or ascertains in Four Quartets on how ultimately there is no difference between the fire and the rose. With hope as the only power that would ultimately sustain life and humanity with “complete simplicity” in ways that the intricate rational power could not, The Waste Land examines and demonstrates, as much as Four Quartets, the limit of rational power in handling “the ungraspable phantom of life”; it showcases how the simple tenacious power of hope would not only sustain the rational power in its search for answers in history as regards the destiny of humanity but also significantly substantiates humanity as a whole through the process of such a search. The simple message of hope would sustain and substantiate humanity in the search in ways more than any rational power would be possibly capable of, if merely by means of its own rational means. This is why I have always remained so motivated by The Waste Land not because of the special kind of “virtuoso mastery of verbal music” that makes me become so instantly fascinated with The Four Quartets even before the poem slowly comes to make sense to me afterward, nor am I motivated by such daunting but still sense-appealing narratology that one would only find in Four Quartets. Certainly, The Waste Land does not have the special kind of classic discipline that substantiates and sustains to my taste the narrative of Four Quartets; it does however also so simultaneously move along with and against the poem’s often overflowing emotion and highflying thoughts for the life of its own, which also flows naturally from inside out as truly “rhythmical creation of [meaningful] beauty” the way poetry is or should be at least according to Edgar Allan Poe. I become fascinated with The Waste Land, first and foremost, rather because of the sharp but ambiguous visual images of the enormously meaning-rich but so often nonsensical sounding allusions that make The Waste Land a uniquely hybrid and particularly challenging modernist text. As such a modernist text, The Waste Land is indeed so reminiscent of the deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, which characterize The Waste Land more than any other poetic texts by Eliot including Four Quartets. I am particularly fascinated with the tenacious tone of hope, which often appears so ironically inherent alive in the intricate hybrid text of the living cultural ecologies, however much the immeasurably rich text could often so easily be taken as such a singular text of overwhelming messages of despair and “image of destruction.” What is however truly singular of The Waste Land in ways as it so fascinates me is then its irreducible message of hope that remains so tenaciously inherent or hidden in every single aspect of the text of the poem from the utmost nonsensical or absurd scenes of life to the utterly “meaningless” function words and too trivial to be ever noticeable phoneme. Still, the message of hope would so readily and tenaciously assert itself from beneath, behind, and between a seemingly pervasive and overwhelming

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sense of despair; it would still assert itself just as life itself does from behind, beneath, and between “the dead tree,” “the dry stone,” and the “stony rubbish” or from underneath the deadly shadows of gigantic rocks as from the corpse buried underneath the dirt of a garden. The message of hope would therefore be delivered in such a singular way that it would even cause us to wonder whether all these utmost “blasphemous” scenes of despair, destruction, desperation, and debauchery are, after all, merely the expedient vehicles that bring out these sound message of hope inherent in them, be it as intended or “unpremeditated, accidental.” In this regard, how could not The Waste Land (1922) then be possibly understood as the indispensable “still point of the turning world” (FQ I, ii) as regards interpretations of Eliot’s poetry? How could it not become, in other words, the pivotal nexus, upon and around which the meaning of all Eliot’s major poetic works, that is, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1917), The Hollow Men (1925), and Ash Wednesday (1930). If all these poetic works often appear so interpenetrated and intertwined in one way or another as regards Eliot’s poetic vision, until everything of his vision culminates in the immaculate artistry and mastery of thoughts in Four Quartets (1936–1942), the vital turning point is definitely marked with The Waste Land. Certainly, in Eliot’s poetic world made and marked by these major pieces, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock apparently leads the way as a remarkable debut or “prelude” that sets a subtle but vital modernist motif of the irreversible moral regression, repentance, redemption as it is so repeated in various further developed leitmotifs or themes in the pieces that follow it. In the particular “prelude,” humanity could certainly be found there as metaphorized as much hopeless and helpless as the utterly outspent evening scene that “spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table” or as symbolized as the lost soul roaming around on the night street as homeless “nighthawks” or “the ungraspable phantom of life,” which is neither possible to hold on to nor easy to let go. So is the scene or sense of loss, self-doubt and self-mockery emerging as if further intensified panoramically upon a grand scale as of The Waste Land as simultaneously from within as from without across any conceivable spatiotemporal boundary. The motif that the “prelude” starts certainly develops further in Eliot’s at least one self-admittedly “blasphemous” piece in ways as he himself thus so refers to The Hollow Men, though, apparently for the good reason, not to The Waster Land, which was published before it. The tenacious message of hope so inherent in every single scene of despair in the latter should be one of the major reasons. In The Hollow Men, if not likewise in a way also in The Waster Land, humanity indeed appears so blasted with a tone of utmost indifference, skepticism, and even cynicism, especially when the poem comes to claim how “This is the way the world ends,” not with a Laughter in the Dark, “Not [even] with a bang

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but a whimper.” After writing at least this one that he openly admitted as “blasphemous” piece, Eliot seems to enter a period of emotional remorse and repentance as it is so marked in Ash Wednesday with such overflowing emotion or robust sentiments in ways it often reminds me of Henry Purcell’s baroque piece “Dido’s Lament.” However, eventually with all his overflowing emotion of remorse and repentance adequately recollected in the selfreflective moment of tranquility, there seems to come the right occasion for the timely redemption as it so ultimately culminates in Four Quartets. The right occasion for timely redemption seems to arrive, in other words, with all the sentiments rightly contained or conveyed in sharp visual imagery, which however could often also be so simultaneously realistic and surrealistic. The right occasion certainly occurs in the company of a distinct “mastery virtuoso of verbal music” in ways so characteristic of Four Quartets with a subtle and vital touch of “complete simplicity” that calmly ascertains that “the fire and rose are one” after all. However, what makes The Waste Land ultimately the pivotal turning point of Eliot’s poetic vision is the subtle and vital transformation, a posteriori, ad infinitum, not only of the verbal elements but also, likewise, of any scene and theme of the ever-present sense of despair and the irreducible message of hope as in ways so characteristic of its live context. Therefore, everything in Eliot’s poetic world could thus so constantly become meaningfully meaningless or meaninglessly meaningful especially in terms of its uniquely featured “paradoxical optimism”; it is solely contingent upon how we deal with everything that could suddenly become so strange however familiar as it otherwise is, used to be, or in the other way around varying with the live context. The scenario could occur and vary at any time with any bit otherwise utterly undetectable or too commonplace to be noticeable function word, phoneme, or a quite dismissible nonsensical sounding allusion. Probably as Eliot himself might also thus suggest with one of the images that frequently appears in The Waste Land as in his other works, such as Four Quartets, that is, “rats,” we, as readers of our modern time, may indeed literally need to assume the role of the scavengers even in ways as indiscriminate as the rats while searching for almost anything otherwise overlooked or discarded as meaningless or too trivial to be noteworthy. With their frequent appearances in The Waste Land as in Four Quartets, the images of rats may not be merely accidental in this regard. The images could certainly appear as such “natural” things or scenes common to any site of wasteland. They could be such meaningful allusions, be they intended, involuntary, or even textually invoked, a posteriori. They would nonetheless still suggest to us all the same not only how to read the text itself but also how to search or scavenge for the hidden message of hope, which is, indeed, as vital as the Holy Grail for the survival of humanity as a whole.

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Undoubtedly, as the text of The Waste Land so exactly indicates, the message of hope must also be searched for in ways or from places so otherwise inadvertently overlooked because of the influences of wasteland from both within and without us. For the purpose, we must leave no stone unturned since everything otherwise so readily dismissible could be an invaluable allusion, be it intended or contextually aroused; it could be as invaluable as the life that remains hidden in this or that “stony rubbish” or as the dao that could be found even “in piss and shit.” The search for the hidden message of hope therefore means that we should take everything as seriously as possible no longer to be so habitually confined to our dichotomic and hierarchical way of thinking; it means we should no longer, in other words, so habitually overemphasize the value of one side at the expense of another, such as overvaluing the importance of “meaningful” content words at the expense of “meaningless” function words inasmuch the same way as overemphasizing the value of idea over the importance of sound. As the case with St. Augustine who initially faced the problem reading the Scripture too literarily until he received his timely help from St. Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, in learning how to balance his reading with an equally important figurative way,71 so did Eliot seem to want us to know how not to read too literally as to miss the message of hope or to read too figuratively as to miss, literally, the most meaningful sounds as inherent in the “meaningless” function words as in the “meaningful” content words. Both are equally important in conveying the indispensable truth-revealing “intermediary sensation,” which Herder values as the inseparable part of meaning in ways as much as Wittgenstein would also thus value them as the such intimate and irreducible “sense [we] are familiar with simply as “an atmosphere accompanying the word. . . into every kind of application.”72 In The Waste Land, it is often not the minimal or nonsensical ideas these sounds sustain or substantiate but rather the familiar sense or “intermediary sensations” that the sounds evoke or invoke that speak so meaningfully of the primitive wisdom of poetry as the primordial first language of humanity’s, which could even sound so much as meaningfully meaningless or meaninglessly meaningful as the nursery rhymes, that is, “London Bridge is falling down,” or any literary allusion in any foreign tongue or in English itself.

NOTES 1. Kenner, The Pound Era, 109. 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid.

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5. Ibid. See also Herder, Treatise on the Origin of Language, https:// www​.marxists​.org​/archive​/herder​/1772​/origins​-language​.htm. 6. Cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s,” https://www​.poetryfoundation​.org​/poems​/47244​/ buffalo​-bill​-s. 7. E. E. Cummings, “I (a,” in Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, ed. Laurie G. Kirszner et al., 3rd ed. (New York: Harcourt, 1991), 634. I (a le af fa ll s) one l iness

8. Kirszner, 1991. 9. All in all, we may thus encounter the actual problem to have such synesthetic experiences translated as adequately as possible into grammatically correct and yet sensemaking regular sentences by means of a content word, such as 見える, to suggest how we actually see the heroin’s cry 稲妻や闇の方で（行く）五位の声が見えた. Even so, we may still see how the actual meaning of the haiku could subtly vary, as expected, “by supplying a missing particle” where it fits in addition to the most noticeable function of や (ya). With this haiku as with so many others, what really matters, after all, literally concerns how the rich possibility of meaning or poetic scene may alter significantly in accordance with a different “function word” that we consider as missing. If the particle で (de), for instance, is used as above, it could mean that one heard the heroin’s cry in the dark. In this case, the verb 行く could mean “flying away from the speaker into the dark,” which is the opposite side of the area where a lightning flashed. If に (ni) is used instead of で, this part of the sentence 闇の方に行く modifies 五位; it then means that I heard a cry of a heron that was flying into the dark (as if it was trying to running away from the lightning). If を(o) is used instead of に, 闇の方を行く modifies 五位; it then means that I heard a cry of a heron that was flying in / through the dark (稲妻や [闇を行く] 五位の声がした). Ultimately, whichever particle is actually used, it could still remain a question as to whether heron’s cry is the visualized sound / psychological impact of the lightening or whether there is indeed such a concurring moment of heron’s cry and darkness-piercing lightening. The entire section on the haiku was gratefully written upon the kind advice from Kazuyo Rumbach Sensei, a colleague, friend, native speaker of Japanese, and Japanese language teacher of mine, especially the part on the issues of how the meaning of haiku may subtly but significantly vary with a supposedly missing particle, which might still be possibly supplied from within a syntactically or textually permissible range of alternatives. 10. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 155–156. 11. Qian, Guan Zhui Pian 管錐篇, 482–484. Such synesthetic experiences often vividly capture the full senses of my students however “inexperienced” as they

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otherwise might be in terms of art appreciation. As I myself can often hear music, such as Miles Davis’s “cool jazz,” in Ansel Adams’ “Moon and Half Dome,” Ryan Wolfe, a student of my Introduction to Humanities class (2: 00 MWF) Fall 2005, could not only hear but also see the sound of silence in the same piece. So could Amy Burgess, another student of my Introduction to Humanities (12: 00 MWF) Spring 2013, vividly see and hear at the same time “the crash of the sea back into itself” from the colorful visual image of Hokusai’s “Great Waves” as she thus wrote in her in-class analysis of the piece. 12. Qian, Guanzhui Pian, 482; Liezi ed. Wang Libo, 84; Graham, Lieh-tzu, 77. 13. Ibid., 28. 14. Kenner, The Pound Era, 109. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid., 110. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Foucault, The Order of Things, 235. 26. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigation, 117, 48e. 27. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 53. 28. Kenner, Pound Era, 377. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid., 378. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., italics added. 36. Matsuo Bashô, Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing (Philadelphia: Harcourt, 1991). 37. Kenner, The Pound Era, 378, italics added. 38. Ibid., 110, italics added. 39. Poe, “The Poetic Principle,” 99. 40. Emerson, “The Poet,” 323. 41. Ibid. 42. Ibid. 43. Indeed, when people “leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the tradition of men (Mark 7:3–9), in ways as “Sermon on the Mount” so indicates, here comes the divine revelation through Jesus as he thus describes his mission by suggesting how “Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I

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have come not to abolish them but to fulfill them” (Matthew 17). For Aquinas, as he observes in Summa Theologica, as long as we know how not to overemphasize erroneously the importance of one at the expense of another, the laws would work in perfect harmony with one another to yield their utmost benefits for humanity. For Aquinas, all the laws we know must be understood as interdependently independent in a mutually enlivening and mutually complementary hierarchy with each carrying its specific function and its inevitable limitation thereby. At the top, there is the eternal law, which is basically inaccessible to mortal humanity as the everlasting law of God, unless mediated through the natural laws at the second tier. As the imperfect but indispensable second tier of mediation, the natural law could still remain inaccessible to many. Consequently, there arises the occasion for the human law as the third tier of mediation. As the further imperfect but equally necessary reflection of the eternal law through the natural law at the third tier, the human law inevitably creates the additional margins of errors in relation with the eternal law. Therefore, from time to time at certain crucial period of history, the business-as-usual law interpreting process would be halted for immediate correction through the divine law when the accumulated margins of error reach the intolerable level before the process could resume its course. As it occurred historically in line with a deep-rooted prophetic tradition of all Abrahamic religions, this process for reducing the margins of error to an acceptable level by means of the divine law through revelation was timely carried out by prophets, such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad; they would try to reregulate human conducts reinterpreting the eternal law through the divine law as revealed in Ten Commandments, Sermons on the Mount, and Koranic message, 76. 44. In fact, what makes the often faint but great music sound or heard in the real world are also geographically and culturally significant phenomena. According to Professor Mikako Ichikawa of Graduate School of Literature and Human Sciences at City University of Osaka, Japan, whom I invited to visit our college for a twoweek Scholar-in-Residence program in April 19–30, 2004, it is certainly the size of Japan besides its history that makes the “sound of water” audible and meaningful. Illuminating her points with photos taken from where Basho’s famous frog haiku was supposedly written, Professor Ichikawa suggested how the size of Kansas, for instance, would not make the sound so audible. Neither would people in Kansas appear as responsive to the sound the way Basho did. America, as Professor Ichikawa so implied, is simply too large for the little sound to be heard or paid attention to. But one of my students, Kathleen B. Walsh, as mentioned above, undoubtedly heard the “unheard sweeter music” that haikus suggested and in response she wrote one herself, for the first time ever in her life, after one of these inspiring lectures by Professor Ichikawa, that is, “On the highway’s edge / Still, wild creatures of Kansas / Sacrificed for speed.” 45. Montaigne, The Essays, 264. 46. Bashô, Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing, 1991. 47. Matsuo Bashô, Western Literature in a World Context (New York: St. Martin, 1995), 417. Indeed, simple as it is, this little great poem captures the crucial moment that turns a brief note of sound into a great tune of music, which communicates through provoked silence; it is a brief note that turns a single isolated action into the

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harmonious orchestra of nature. However, without a responsive mind that transcends or loses itself to the infinitely subtle rhythm of nature as of words, this marvelous note of music and the subsequent echoes or orchestra of silence could only fall on deaf ear. The poem illuminates how as long as we are ready, we can be the part of such action that poem perfectly suggests through such a little note of sound and its profound echoes in silence. It is because the poem depicts the “dramatic” moment when our fractal or fragmented self literally slips into the watery universe of the pond following the little frog as the “vehicle” and becomes part of the system of nature. Does not the “jump frog” also resemble so much a “insignificant” phoneme or a “meaningless” function word that would likely occasion as much “a sea change” as the “jumping frog” does to the “ancient pond”? Would not such an otherwise too insignificant to be ever readily noticeable phoneme or function word be possibly also occasioning the same amount of immeasurable psychological impact in “the ancient pond” of our text as in our minds? 48. Ibid. 49. Reeves, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, 99–100. 50. Adittapariyaya Sutta: The Fire Sermon, https://www​.accesstoinsight​.org​/tipitaka /sn/sn35/sn35​.028​.nymo​.h​tml. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid. 53. Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 314. 54. Ibid. 55. Actually, as I personally saw the piece in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as well as some of my former students in the classroom, from behind the storm there is a possible image of devil emerging with his horns sticking out along with his eyes. The message delivered or emphasized is therefore how the body is dead but the “soul” flies off upward, no matter how the world could possibly be as terrible as hell. Indeed, this is the special kind of world view typical of El Greco famous for his emphatic and exclusive use of cold color for the delivery of his mystic religious view with his distinctive religious zeal. https://www​.niceartgallery​.com​/El​-Greco-(Domenikos-Theotokopoulos)/Christ​-On​-The​-Cross​-With​ -Landscapes​.html​?from​=ads​&target​=pla​-842757906928​&key=​&device​=c​&gclid​ =EAI​aIQo​bChM​Imdm​fncO​M8gIVl​-azC​h3n2​Qu8E​AQYA​SA​BE​gJzBvD​_BwE#​ &gid​=1​&pid​=1. 56. Peter Paul Rubens, “Christ on the Cross,” https://www​.etsy​.com​/listing​ /777315003​ / 8​ - handmade​ - art​ - peter​ - paul​ - rubens​ ? gpla ​ = 1 ​ & gao ​ = 1& ​ & utm ​ _ source​ =google​ & utm​ _ medium​ = cpc​ & utm​ _ campaign​ = shopping ​ _ us ​ _ easter ​ _ Art ​ _ and​ _Collectibles​&utm​_custom1=​_k​_EAI​aIQo​bChM​IyrG​n4sW​M8gI​Viwe​ICR0​0LwS​ dEAQ​YAyA​BEgLLhvD​_BwE​_k_​&utm​_content​=go​_1707294379​_69268677569​ _331635229917​_pla​-314954651933​_c_​_777315003​_169160619​&utm​_custom2​ =1707294379​&gclid​=EAI​aIQo​bChM​IyrG​n4sW​M8gI​Viwe​ICR0​0LwS​dEAQ​YAyA​ BEgLLhvD​_BwE. With the cross appearing further invisible and the yellow-colored body hanging up there in the air, the focus of the painting by Peter Paul Rubens is undoubtedly the twisted and stiffened torso and the face, which is also twisted with the expression of unutterable pain and desperation. This painting is in the style of

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Baroque with an emphasis on the humanity rather than on the divinity part of Jesus; it emphasizes, in other words, the actual pain as any ordinary humanity would suffer under the same circumstances, if not more, since Jesus is believed to have been thus suffering for all the human races. As piece of Baroque art, this painting definitely appears most realistic of all the other three. However badly the body may appear so twisted to emphasize the unbearable suffering, it is still adequately proportioned in terms of science of anatomy; it is no longer elongated. The color of body, the muscle, the dirt on the feet are realistic all apparently consistent with Jesus’ social status or occupation as an ordinary laborer. Even if the image of crucifixion could appear slighted exaggerated in terms of the violently twisted body and highly up raised arms, the pose itself is realistic with regard to the actual scenario of crucifixion; the victims were often choked to a slow painful death in a variable pace according to their own body weights. Indeed, this painting could probably be considered as the most realistic piece in depicting Jesus suffering the utmost pain and despair at least in terms of the repeated line in the Bible, that is, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15:33) when Jesus feels so abandoned or betrayed (forsaken) while giving out his last breath. Not only the pose of torso suggests the use of tension-emphasizing straight vertical line but also the up raised arms indicates a further sharpened tensionhighlighting V-shape. The piece, however, would never be possibly considered as true masterpiece the way it always is, if it is just so brutally realistic by offering viewers such a despairing account of Jesus. There must be something else essential there that makes the piece a masterpiece behind, beneath, and between everything on the surface; there must be “the essential but invisible” that we all might have unfortunately missed. There must be, ultimately, in other words, something else there that, as I always argue, can so smoothly reconcile with the brutal aspect of reality to give people a sense of hope or triumph in ways as we have seen in the pieces above that masterfully suggest “reconciliation of the irreconcilable.” Do you not see any sign of such reconciliation here in this picture? With the cross appearing so barely visible, the body hanging so brightly up in the sky against pitch-dark background, do you not see a suggestively downward motion and upward motion at the same time? Downward motion certainly suggests realistic aspect of suffering with the victim being slowly choked to his slow painful death by his own body weight, whereas upward motion indicates hope or triumph with the spirit or soul transcending the hell-like reality up to the Paradise of joy, the humanity’s blissful Prelapsarian home. 57. Foucault, The Order of Things, 235. 58. Ibid. 59. Kenner, The Pond Era, 109. 60. Coleridge, “Chapter 13 on the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,” 396. 61. As translated in Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, “Thunder [is] that divine voice [that] respects the very same syllable: ‘Da, Da, Da’—Demonstrate restraint! Demonstrate honesty! Demonstrate compassion! One should observe the same triad—restraint, honesty, and compassion.” 5.4.1;73). 62. Swift, Gulliver’s Travels, 318. 63. Toulmin, Return to Reason, 180. 64. Ibid., 182.

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65. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 53. 66. James, Essays in Radical Empiricism, 95, italics added. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., italics added. 69. Coleridge, “Chapter 13 on the Imagination, or Esemplastic Power,” 396. 70. Kenner, The Pound Era, 378. 71. As indicated in his own autobiography The Confessions of St. Augustine, it is not until he finally received his timely help from St. Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, St. Augustine was inasmuch the same trouble as Nicodemus, literally questioned “How can a man be born when he is old?” since “Surely he cannot enter a second time into his mother’s womb to be born!” (John 3:4) or anyone who also take such a literal reading the message in the Bible “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple (Luke 14:26) as if Jesus does asks one to hate one’s family so literally instead of using the statement as a figure of speech to emphasize what is of the utmost importance over the commonly conceived as the most invaluable. 72. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 117, 48e.

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Index

/ɒ/-sounding words, 23 abstraction, 233, 234 absurdity and nonsenses, 121–26 Ackroyd, Peter, 49, 50, 131, 142 Adams, Ansel, 74n152, 77n186, 185– 87, 231 adjective, 161, 165, 167 Adorno, Theodor, 42, 43, 103, 200 adverbs, 133, 161, 165, 167 The Aeneid, 199, 218n15, 236 aesthetic pattern, 59 alienation, 94, 172 allusions: contextualized mindliberating power of, 104–6; literal and figurative use, 106–9; meaning/ function of, 101–4 allusiveness, 102, 117 allusive scenarios, 102 Ames, Roger, 12, 242 amphibrach, 7, 88 The Analects of Confucius (Ames and Rosemont, Jr.), 13 anapest, 7, 88 “and,” 86–92, 156, 157–60 animated films, 60, 170 Antigone (Sophocles), 196 antithesis, 81, 82, 99, 137 apocalyptic scenes, 84

Aptilon, Sarah, 241, 242 Aquinas, Thomas, 109, 145n14, 265 aristocratic life, 105 Arnold, Mathew, 2, 243 “Ars Poetica”? (MacLeish), 48, 241 article, 133 artworks, 32–33, 55, 116, 131, 177, 185, 237, 245 Ash Wednesday (Eliot), 4, 30, 58, 161, 165, 288, 289 The Assistant (Malamud), 243 Auden, W. H., 39, 200 auditory imagination, 2, 5–7, 10, 17–19, 24, 27, 29, 31, 38, 43–46, 49, 52, 57, 59, 62, 97, 106, 111, 125, 126, 255, 277 Auerbach, Erick, 12, 52, 56, 142, 207, 209, 223, 230, 243, 253 authenticity, 105 authorial intentions, 7, 12, 24, 43, 91, 102–4, 108, 113, 156, 157, 263 author’s impulses, 103, 200, 204 The Awakening (Chopin), 125 Bakhtiarynia, Ben, 50, 51 Balzac, Honoré de, 113, 204 baroque, 54 Barthes, Roland, 7, 25, 36, 56, 71n122, 152n72, 169, 170 309

310

Index

Bashō, Matsuo, 27, 43, 83, 260, 269 Baudelaire, Charles, 7, 35, 36, 38, 83, 89, 211 beauty and charm, 236–37 Beckett, Samuel, 174 Bedient, Calvin, 3, 18, 55, 60, 61, 92 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 61, 178, 230 Bellow, Saul, 242, 243 Bentley, Joseph, 18, 40 Berlin, Isaiah, 33, 244 Blake, William, 42, 45, 84, 162, 166, 189, 252 blank/plain space, 13 “A Blessing” (Wright), 43, 122, 124, 132, 184n19, 237 “blitz,” 89, 252, 278 Bloom, Harold, 30, 43, 47 “Blue in Green” (Davis), 117 Bonaparte, Louis, 191 bond-making process, 170–77 book cover picture, 168–69 Brecht, Bertolt, 204, 205 Brhadaranyaka Upanishad, 183n18 Brickner, Connie, x, 64n21, 169 Brickner, Joe, 168 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 254 Brooker, Jewel S., 18, 40 Broomfield, Andrea, xi, 152n72 The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoevsky), 214 Browning, Robert, 153n74 brutal austerity, 224, 240 Buber, Martin, 42, 82, 92–94, 96, 98, 147n19, 171 Buddhism, 148n19, 219n42 Buell, Lawrence, 199 “Buffalo Bill’s” (Cummings), 252 Burke, Edmund, 27, 258, 283 “Burnt Norton” (Eliot), 60, 99, 158, 163, 164, 223, 240, 257 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 132 Catch-22 (Heller), 243 The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 243

Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), 61, 230 Chadwick, Douglas H., 226 Chatman, Seymour, 39, 114, 188 Chaucer, Jeffrey, 132, 133 “Chicago” (Sandburg), 43, 45, 84, 189, 272 Chinese jar, 3, 11, 14, 49, 51, 58–60, 84, 93, 103, 104, 117, 137, 140, 155, 159, 161, 196, 212, 229, 235, 236, 239, 240, 275 Chinese Jewry, 247–48n34 Chomsky, Noam, 62 Chopin, Kate, 125 Christianity, 109, 115, 116, 194, 215 “Christ on the Cross” (Rubens), 115, 274 “Christ on the Cross with Landscape” (Greco), 273 chronos, 229, 230, 286 cinema, 60, 170 classicism, 224, 230, 238 collaged texts, 35, 118, 119 common language, 10, 11, 18, 23, 53, 57, 91, 92, 104, 110, 119, 120, 126, 138, 139 The Confession of St. Augustine (St. Augustine of Hippo), 109, 215 Confucianism, 148n19 conjunctions, 41, 87, 89–91, 93, 128, 133, 158, 159, 268 Conrad, Joseph, 166, 252 consonant sounds, 262, 280 content words, 23, 24, 33, 37, 100, 101, 104, 107, 128, 134–35, 156, 263 context-specific allusions, 84 contextual elements, 101 Cooper, John Xiros, 51 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 199, 201 Crawford, Robert, 60 creation narratives, 8–9, 92, 143n13 creation process, 82, 91, 171, 231 Cretan Paradox, 94–98, 100 criss-crossing, 245

Index

cross-cultural literary approaches, 18, 56, 141, 167 crucifixion, 115, 274 cultural reality, 52 Cummings, E. E., 47, 216, 252, 279 cyclic pattern, 258–60 dactyl, 7, 88 daemonic eloquence, 47–52 Dalai Lama, 242 Dali, Salvador, 46, 131, 161 Dante, 42, 204, 216, 272, 276 Dao, 13, 22, 58, 97, 141, 212 Daodejing (Laozi), 13, 14, 22, 58, 144n14 Daoism, 148n19, 214, 219n42 Davis, Miles, 117 dayin, 90, 91, 97 death, 4, 19, 36, 53, 56, 59, 85, 95, 115, 123, 125, 170, 192, 216, 221, 222, 224, 232, 233, 238, 244 “death by water,” 222, 223, 225, 226, 229, 232, 233, 243 “Death by Water” (Eliot), 59, 60, 64n20, 232, 235, 237, 241–45 Death of a Salesman (Miller), 124 “deeply interpenetrated living cultural ecologies,” 2, 6, 7, 9, 11–13, 29, 31, 33–35, 37, 43, 48, 50, 55, 56, 58, 62, 81, 86, 90, 91, 106, 112, 139–42, 177, 221, 242 de facto allusions, 37, 101, 102, 104, 128 definite article, 39–40, 44–46, 90, 93, 157–59, 185, 260 dehumanization, 200, 202 Descartes, René, 18, 124 descriptive function, 18, 26, 57, 86, 118 desolation, 20, 21, 44 despair, 6–10, 22, 23, 44, 56, 84, 126, 135, 140, 192, 214–16, 223, 224, 235, 243, 274 destruction, 6–8, 10, 17, 20, 54, 57, 86, 126, 135, 140, 190, 235, 243, 256, 263

311

Dickenson, Emily, 22, 132–34, 273 “dictionary of the soul,” 2, 8, 17, 57, 84, 97, 112, 259 “Dido’s Lament” (Purcell), 289 discordant resonance, 85 Divine Comedy (Dante), 204, 272, 276 divine creation, 82, 92, 231 divine voices, 24, 56 Dœuff, Michèle le, 35, 140 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 11, 65n31, 89, 120, 214 Dracula (Stocker), 47 Dream of Red Chamber, 92, 145n15, 147n19 Dreams (Yume, 1990), 121 “The Dry Salvages,” 99, 158, 163, 164, 213 “du,” 96, 97, 110–13 dualism, 19 “dun wu,” 123 “East Coker” (Eliot), 52, 96, 98, 99, 158, 163, 164, 258 echoes, 8–13, 278–81 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Marx), 191 “eine Sammlung von Elementen der Poesie” (“A Dictionary of the Soul”), 10, 29, 254, 278 Either/Or (Kierkegaard), 16, 66n51, 124 “El Desdichadom” (Nerval), 57, 274, 276 Eliot, T. S., 1–4, 7, 8, 14, 15, 18–20, 28, 30, 31, 35–36, 38, 39, 43, 47–52, 54–59, 61, 62, 81, 85, 86, 90, 94, 97, 98, 105, 106, 127, 129, 131–33, 136, 137, 139, 142, 155, 156, 161, 163– 65, 169, 187, 189, 200, 208, 212–14, 222, 224, 228, 229, 236, 239, 244, 251, 254, 255, 257, 259, 272, 275, 278, 286–90 Ellis, Steve, 39, 48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 31, 86, 123, 193, 199, 217n8 emphatic stress, 143n8

312

Index

English language, 1, 200 ennui, 89 Enquiry of concerning of Human Understanding (Hume), 148n25 The Epic of Gilgamesh, 8, 92, 143n13, 183n18, 223 epistemology, 4, 156, 158, 160, 167, 168, 188, 261 Essay on Criticism (Pope), 31 exacerbated sensibility, 47 Fact and Fable in Psychology (Jastrow), 21 Faust (Goethe), 13, 14, 35, 52, 142, 230, 253 Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 66n51 Feng, You-lan, 136, 137 “The Fire Sermon,” 40, 44, 54, 179, 203, 215, 216, 272 “first language,” 10, 27, 29, 84, 96, 97, 112, 253, 254, 256, 258, 260, 275, 278, 284 “Fish-Eye View” (Parini), 201 Fitzpatrick, Maureen, 152n72 fluid verbal patterns, 260 foreign languages, 33, 84, 89, 110, 112, 119, 210, 270, 281 foreign tongues, 1, 3, 6, 16, 24, 27–29, 32, 37, 97, 101, 105, 106, 112, 204, 255, 266, 275, 277, 278; performative words from, 269–76; “the sweeter, unheard melody” echoing alive in, 210–14 foreign words, 211, 278–81 “forgetting yourself” approach, 205 For Lancelot Andrewes (Eliot), 51 formal elements, 44, 47, 58, 83, 87, 137, 257 Foucault, Michel, 24, 25, 28, 44, 83, 179, 257, 275 Four Quartets (Eliot), 3–5, 11, 14, 15, 24, 25, 30, 31, 38–40, 42, 44, 46, 48, 49, 51, 52, 56, 58, 60, 63n20, 68n78,

75n160, 84, 85, 90, 94, 96–101, 103, 127, 129, 130, 132, 137, 140, 141, 150n53, 155, 158, 159, 161, 163–64, 166, 208, 209, 213, 215, 223, 225, 228, 236, 237, 239, 240, 251, 255, 257–59, 264, 266, 272, 282, 287, 289 Freud, Sigmund, 4, 15, 19, 30, 179 Froehlich, Karlfried, 109 “From Billie Holiday To Edith Piaf” (Quintet and Galliano), 34, 116 Frost, Robert, 43, 122–24, 127, 132, 174, 176, 179, 184n19 functionalization, 23, 39, 90 function words, 23–25, 32, 33, 37, 39–45, 47–49, 57, 59, 83, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 100, 101, 104, 107, 118, 119, 123, 126–35, 137, 139, 140, 143n8, 156, 170, 187, 200, 203, 204, 208, 209, 258, 280, 283; performative function of, 157–60 Galliano, Richard, 34, 116 Genesis, 8, 82, 83, 90–93, 102, 145n15, 183n18, 190, 227, 231, 276 genres, 34 German language, 97, 105, 110 gestalt, 59, 61, 125, 126 Ginsberg, Allen, 242 “The Girl from Ipanema,” 34–35, 116 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 13, 14, 35, 90, 131, 142, 147n18, 167, 176, 230, 253, 278, 280, 281 The Golden Bough (Frazer), 4 Götterdämmerung (Wagner), 10, 21, 38, 189, 191 grammatical rules, 88 “The Great Waves” (Hokusai), 53, 55 Grecian vases, 14, 161 Greco, El, 273 Guanzhui Bian (Qian, Zhongshu), 167, 253 Gulick, Amy, 226 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 42, 55, 281, 286

Index

Hackworth, Bobby, 242, 247n33 Hackworth, Frank Mason, 242 haikus, 27, 43, 83, 260, 269 Halle, Morris, 62 Hamilton, G. Rostrevor, 39, 200 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 162, 179, 265, 275, 276 Handel, George Frideric, 191, 211 “Harlem” (Hughes), 84 Hauck, Christina, 50 Heap, Jane, 49 Hebraic narrative tradition, 12, 13, 56, 126, 135, 142, 207, 209, 212, 223, 230, 231, 243 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 191 Heisenberg, Werner, 19 Heller, Joseph, 243 Heraclitus, 225 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 1, 10, 15, 25, 27, 28, 30, 57, 62, 89, 126, 127, 147n18, 204, 212, 251, 252, 254, 258, 275, 278 Herzog (Bellow), 242, 243 The History of Chinese Philosophy (Feng, You-lan), 136 Hokusai, Katsushika, 53, 55, 224, 230 The Hollow Men (Eliot), 4, 20, 22, 58, 67n76, 164, 165, 288 Holt, Michael, 52 Holy Grail, 193, 194, 196, 197, 214 Homeric tradition, 12, 13, 52, 56, 126, 135, 142, 207, 209, 212, 223, 230, 231, 243 Hongloumeng, 148n19, 219n42 Hopper, Edward, 172 houshu, 90, 91, 97 Howard, Thomas, 214 Hughes, Langston, 84, 153n74 Huizi, 138, 176 human agency, 40, 133, 201, 226 human cognition, 114, 140 Human Comedy (Balzac), 204 human destiny, 224, 225 humanity, 8, 10, 11, 15, 23–25, 28, 29, 33, 42, 53, 55–57, 77n186, 84, 85,

313

97, 113, 122, 131, 142, 172, 177, 193, 199, 201, 204–6, 223, 233, 238, 264, 265, 285, 286, 288 Hume, David, 103, 148n25 hybrid text, 131, 132, 135–37, 139–41 “I,” 7, 88, 94–96, 98–101, 107, 110–12, 133, 136, 160, 171–73, 190, 231–33; versatility of, 194–98 iambic pattern, 132–34 iambic pentameter, 38, 132 iambic terameter, 88 identity crises, 94–96 The Idiot (Dostoevsky), 214 The Iliad, 199, 218n15, 236 “Il pleure dans mon coeur” (Verlaine), 89, 278–79 imaginary characters, 113–17 immortality, 223 improvisation, 34 “In a Station of Metro” (Pound), 108 incommunicability, 94, 95 incommunicable verbal nonsenses, 117–21, 125, 136 indefinite article, 90, 268 infinite space, 7 informed imagination, 30–33, 35, 141, 244, 248n35 interlocking sound pattern, 262–65 intermediary sensation, 2, 5–7, 10, 11, 17–19, 21, 24, 25, 27–30, 37, 38, 43–49, 52, 57, 59, 61, 62, 84, 85, 88–90, 96, 97, 105, 106, 110–12, 125–29, 131, 139, 140, 156, 204, 212, 236, 251–58, 260, 266, 270, 274, 275, 277, 279, 290 “intermezzo,” 61, 222, 230, 232 interplaying, 21–23, 25, 53, 56, 262 The Interpretation of Dreams (Freud), 15, 30 intertextuality, 207 “inviolable voice,” 155, 156, 161–63, 168, 206 involuntary allusion, 50, 128, 167 “I-Other,” 42, 82, 83, 92–94, 96

314

Index

“island-hopping” strategy, 4–8, 34, 106 itemization, 40, 41, 42, 59, 68n78, 114, 128, 158, 159, 160, 185, 187, 190, 200 “I-Thou,” 42, 82, 83, 92–94, 96, 198 I-You bond: allusions-mediated dialog, 109–13; role-performing agency of, 190–92 Jackson, Shirley, 202 James, Henry, 39, 53, 216 James, William, 41, 42, 128, 283 Jasperson, Janette, ix, x, 152n72 Jastrow, Joseph, 21 Jesus: The Human Face of God (Parini), 92, 144n14, 232 The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet’s Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (Kamenetz), 242 jingling tones, 20, 22, 262 Johnson, Rochelle, 201 Johnson, Samuel, 198 Jones, David, 225 Joyce, James, 19 Judaism, 242, 243, 247n34 Julius Caesar (Shakespeare), 182n13 jumbled musical text, 34 Jung, C. G., 12, 13, 35, 52, 114, 142, 210, 230, 253 Kabuki, 54 Kafka, Franz, 243 kairos, 229, 230, 231, 286 Kamenetz, Roger, 242, 247n34 Kandinsky, Wassily, 107, 116, 120, 121, 177 Kawabata, Yasunari, 169 Keats, John, 14, 85, 111, 160, 161, 169, 188 Kenner, Hugh, 28, 35, 251, 255, 258, 259, 278 keywords, 22–23, 103, 104 Kierkegaard, Soren, 16, 124, 194 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 154n74 King Wen of Zhou, 198

Kramer, Paul, 213 Kurosawa, Akira, 121 Kyd, Thomas, 275, 276 Lacan, Jacques, 30, 179 La Comédie humaine, 59, 113, 238 La Divina Commedia, 59, 113, 238 langue and parole, 11–12, 31–33, 37, 55, 62 Laocoon: An Essay on Limits of Painting and Poetry (Lessing), 60, 156, 166, 237 Laozi, 13, 14, 136 “Two Large Forms” (Moore), 233 LeClercq, Jacques, 72n123 Lee, Berrick, 149n48 Le Gallienne, Richard, 96 leitmotifs, 37, 81, 206 Le Petit Prince (de Saint-Exupery), 67n75 Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), 7, 35, 38, 83, 89 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 60, 156, 166, 253 Levinas, Immanuel, 42, 82, 92–94, 96, 98, 99, 147n19, 171, 206, 232 Liezi (Qian, Zhongshu), 167, 224–27 life: cycle, 222, 224–27, 238; forms, 228; primitive and performative sounds of, 265–69 life-affirming sounds, 1, 6–8, 10, 15, 17, 19–22, 52, 57 linguistic alienation, 17, 61, 270 literary allusions, 3, 5–8, 10, 27, 32–34, 92, 110, 130, 142, 255 literary contexts, 50, 112, 130, 131, 179 literary phenomenon, 39 literary references, 5, 6, 34, 35, 83, 92, 110, 130, 142 literary texts, 42, 50, 55, 90, 113, 132, 142, 166, 270 “Little Gidding” (Eliot), 99, 163, 164 live context, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30, 33, 37–39, 43, 49, 53, 84, 85, 87, 89, 92, 98, 100, 101, 105–8, 110, 111, 112,

Index

114, 115, 121, 125, 127, 130, 131, 141, 156, 167, 205, 223, 236–37, 245, 251, 263, 277 Li, Yu, 167 Locke, John, 18, 86, 123, 174, 199 logic, 25, 118, 126, 127, 255 logocentrism, 141 London, image of, 84, 189 “London” (Blake), 42, 45, 84, 162, 166, 252 “London Bridge is falling down falling down”?, 6–8, 10, 16, 17, 20–22, 26, 49, 84, 119, 126, 178, 235, 236, 243, 256, 263, 266, 267, 271, 283 “Looking for Mr. Green” (Bellow), 243 Loos, Adolf, 14, 31 Lord Jesus Christ, 92, 108, 109, 115, 116, 194, 231, 273 Lord Lü Shang, 198 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 294n55 “The Lottery” (Jackson), 202 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (Eliot), 4, 39, 58, 164, 288 Lukacs, Georg, 53 lullabies, 6, 7, 16, 17, 21, 22, 84, 126, 236, 256, 267 Luther, Martin, 109 MacLeish, Archibald, 48, 86, 241 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 67n77 Maillol, Aristide, 59, 61, 221, 233, 234, 236–39 Malamud, Bernard, 243 Manichaean tradition, 108 ‘Mariana’ (Tennyson), 47 Marx, Karl, 191, 217n8, 276 Mascagni, Pietro, 61, 230 Maud (Tennyson), 47 “meaningful” content words, 9, 23, 24, 33, 37, 57, 103, 114, 157, 263, 271, 283, 290 “meaningless” function words, 9, 20, 23, 24, 33, 37, 44, 47, 57, 83, 86, 87,

315

103, 114, 133, 136, 157, 255, 257, 263, 271, 283, 290 meaning-making elements, 44 Mediterranean, 234–35 “The Mediterranean” (Maillol), 59, 61, 221, 233, 234, 238–41 melancholy, 89 Melville, Herman, 31, 176 Mendelssohn, Felix, 244 “Mending Wall” (Frost), 43, 122, 124, 174, 176, 177 merry-making parody, 211 message of hope, 29, 30, 56–58, 82–86, 110, 126, 135, 140, 152n72, 209, 214–16, 223, 224, 231–33, 235, 236, 243, 271, 287, 288; alive with perceiving-I, 40–43; in bond-making nonsense-talking and barrier-making team effort, 170–74; and despair as inseparable “mon frère,” 53–56; inherent in sounds of despair, 15–19; “intermediary sensation”/”auditory imagination,” 43–46; in jazz-like allusions, 33–38; as life-substantiating echoes of void of chaos, 7–13; revelation through “mon frère,” 227–32; in “stony rubbish” in words, 22–25; sustaining language, 190–92; in text-enlivening trivial life-affirming sound, 19–22; through infinitely variable scopes, 281–86 metamorphosis, 99, 188, 190, 193, 195– 97, 199, 202, 206, 223, 226 “Metamorphosis” (Kafka), 243 meta-structure, 26 meter-making argument, 58, 264 metric pattern, 280 Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Zhang Longxi), 154n82 Miller, Arthur, 124 Miller, Cristanne, 133 Miller, James, 35, 36, 86, 123, 174, 199

316

Index

Milton, John, 71n122, 82, 183n18 Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Auerbach), 207 mind-bewildering, 56, 110, 130, 131, 139, 168, 171, 208, 212, 229, 231, 255 mind-boggling allusions, 30, 118, 125, 126 minimalism, 233, 234 model of reality, 40–41 modernity, 122, 172, 182–83n14 The Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Jung), 114, 210 momentary pauses, 87, 125 “mon frère,” 1, 4, 7, 11, 33–38, 42, 53–56, 61, 62, 81, 83, 86, 103, 106, 112, 113, 118, 119, 132, 156, 162, 167, 177, 178, 198, 199, 203–6, 211, 215, 227–32, 245, 274 monism, 19 montage, 59, 89, 156, 170, 285 Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de, 37, 103, 129, 268 Moody, A. David, 17, 19, 30, 59, 60, 225 “Moon and Half Dome” (Adams), 74n152, 77n186, 185, 186, 231 “Moonlight Sonata” (Beethoven), 61, 230 Moore, Henry, 221, 233, 238–41 motionless motion, 3, 45, 46, 52, 58, 60, 84, 101, 140, 159, 160, 162, 166, 212, 228, 260, 269 Munch, Edvard, 252, 269 Murphy, Jeanne, x, 64n22 museum effect, 30–33, 35, 116, 117, 274, 280 mutual illumination, 90, 92, 121–26, 142, 174, 244, 281 “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—” (Dickinson), 134 mythopoeia, 10, 29 Nabucca (Verdi), 243 narrative function, 18, 26, 86, 118

narrative modes switching, 192–94 narrative order, 106, 107 narrative pace, 93, 94, 134 narrative pattern, 48, 164 narrative rhythm, 117, 126–31, 134 narrative structure, 93, 94, 128, 163 narrative voices, 55, 83 narratology, 56, 142, 243 native tongues, 110 natural allusion, 90–92 nature, power of, 53–54 negative capability, 12, 32, 33, 35, 85, 139–41, 166 Nerval, Gérard de, 57, 274–76 Newtonian mechanics, 9, 40 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 11, 13, 25, 36, 52, 56, 65n31, 71n122, 152n72, 170, 197, 214, 253, 285 The Night (Wiesel), 243 “Nighthawks” (Hopper), 172 nominalization, 39, 45, 46, 90, 100, 133, 152n68, 159, 160, 185 nonsenses, 177–80, 266 nonsense-talking, 170–77, 198 nonsensical parody, 193 nonsensical sounding allusions, 6, 10, 26–32, 37, 38, 48, 57, 82, 267, 289 normal stress, 143n8 Northern African civilization, 234 Nostormo (Conrad), 166, 252 The Notes from Underground (Dostoevsky), 89, 65n31 noun groups, 39, 200 nouns, 114 nymphs, 44–46, 187–90, 192, 194–95 objective correlative, 54, 59 “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats), 111 “The Ode to the West Wind” (Shelley), 11, 204 The Odyssey, 236 Oe, Kenzaburo, 242 onomatopoeia, 193, 206 “On the Equality of Things” (Zhuangzi), 111, 160

Index

Ontiveros, Lisa, 73n135 ontology, 2, 4, 49, 156, 158, 160, 168, 188, 261 optical illusion, 60, 170 Orientalism, 256 Oriental religion, 214 “otherized,” 122, 199–202, 233 Ovivelle, Patrick, 225 “Painted Cross: Saint Francis Legend,” 115, 117 Pandora (Goethe), 13, 90, 142, 167 Paradise Lost (Milton), 82, 183n18 “paradoxical optimism,” 262, 267, 269 parallelism, 84, 129, 267, 268 Parini, Jay, 92, 107, 108, 144n14, 201, 232 parodic allusions, 83, 84 parodic excursion, 196–97 parody, 38, 67, 118, 179, 188, 191, 260, 275 “Parsifal” (Verlaine), 193, 215 Paul’s epistles, 193 pauses, 88, 89, 170 Peck, John, xi, xii, xviin7, 168 Peck, Pam, xi, xii, xviin7, xviiin12, xixn12 Penda, Petar, 51 pensive pause, 4, 61, 123, 125, 228–31 perceiving-I, 40–43, 186, 192–94, 198– 204, 206, 238 performative and participatory function of language, 16, 36–39, 48, 49, 53, 57, 81–142, 191; contextualized mind-liberating power of allusions, 104–6; Cretan Paradox and problematic issues of I and/as You, 95–98; cross-reference, 131–35; function of characters, 113–17; function of I and You, 92–95; involuntary role of “and,” 90–92; literal and figural sense of balancing as allusions-mediated I-You dialog, 109–13; literal and figurative use of words and allusions, 106–9; mutual

317

illumination, 121–26; necessity of restraint, 101–4; perceiving You as otherized I and I as alienated You, 98–101; picture of void pictures incommunicable picture of reality, 135–39; role of function words, 126–31; role of performing “and,” 86–90; scavenging message of hope, 83–86; text as meaningful void of interpenetrated living cultural ecologies, 139–42; verbally incommunicable nonsenses and silence, 117–21 performative function: of function words, 157–60 performative message of sound, 256–59 performative narration: into living ecologies of text, 198–204; for “the sweeter, unheard melody” hidden in words, 204–9 performative nonsenses, 8, 10, 25–30, 84, 85, 104, 139, 270, 277–79 performative power, 37, 38, 48, 94, 118, 119, 135, 136, 155, 156, 157, 190, 191; of language, 253–56; of “still,” 160–63 performative sounds, 28 performative verbal allusions, 89 performative words, 269–76 performing-I, 187, 198–204, 238 “persistence of vision,” 59, 60, 87, 156, 170 persona, 40, 95, 100, 111, 122–25, 134, 136, 162, 163, 176, 185, 187, 201, 203, 228 personal account as reference, 167–70 A Personal Matter (Oe), 242 personification, 39, 41, 46, 74n152, 114, 136, 159, 185, 187, 188, 203 philology, 28 philosophical imagination, 140, 141, 254 phonemes, 10, 32, 37, 39, 44, 47, 49, 57, 83, 84, 86, 208, 255, 257, 263, 264, 267, 271

318

phonemic components, 31 phonemic elements, 37, 83 phonemic symphony, 95, 101 phonetic structure, 27 phonocentrism, 141 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz, 19, 107, 116, 131, 177 pictorial relationship, 41 The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde), 96, 162 Pirruccello, Ann, xv, 154n78 Plato, 9, 92, 205 The Pleasure of the Text (Barthes), 7 Poe, Edgar Allan, 111, 160, 188, 287 “poetic acrobatics,” 47–52, 131, 142 poetic expression, 50, 63n20 poetic form, 49–51, 230 poetic idiom, 51 poetic imagination, 50, 85 poetic language, 16, 49 poetic structure, 222, 244 poetic world, 3, 4, 85, 286–90 poetry-composing technique, 3 poetry-making scheme, 58 “Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina” (Dante), 37, 216, 272 Pope, Alexander, 31 Pound, Ezra, 108, 229, 230, 240, 251, 278 pragmatics, 21 pragmatism, 21 prepositions, 90, 123, 132, 133, 135, 260, 268 “primitive wisdom,” 7, 10, 21, 28, 29, 38, 57, 97, 112, 127, 204, 212, 253, 254, 256, 258–60 primordial language, 11, 28 “The Problem with Curiosity” (Thomas), 149n48 Procrustean patterns, 44, 47, 49, 58 pronoun, 132 propositions, 41, 42, 95, 114, 125, 138, 140, 277 prosodic role, 88 prosody, 131, 258

Index

Proust, Marcel, 86 psychosocial needs, 52 Purcell, Henry, 289 “purely grammatical,” 24, 83, 87, 137, 275 Qian, Zhongshu, 167, 253 Quintet, Wynton Marsalis, 34, 116 Rachmaninoff, Sergei, 61, 230 Radical Empiricism (James), 41, 128, 283 radical experiments, 50 rational approach, 120 rational power, 24, 25 Rauschenberg, Robert, 107, 116, 120 readers’ discretion, 102 real characters, 113–17 rebirth, 225, 231 redemption, 228 Reeves, Gareth, 8, 17, 18, 26, 36, 61, 102, 117, 270 reincarnation, 221, 223, 272 Religion Within the Limited Reason (Kant), 248n34 “remembering yourself” method, 205 repetition and variation method, 49 repetitive pattern, 20, 21 resonant verbal patterns, 16, 23, 37, 47 resurrection, 224, 231 revelation: in cycle of life in Upanishads and in Liezi, 225–27; of hope in text of void as meaningful ecologies, 244–45; of message of hope through “mon frère,” 227–32; as sculpted timely timelessness of hope, 232–38 reversibility, 19, 38–40, 83, 94, 106, 107 reversible narrative modes, 208 reversible pattern, 98–101 Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini (Rachmaninoff), 61, 230 rhyming pattern, 90 rhythmical structure, 93

Index

rhythmic fluidity, 44, 48, 93, 94 rhythmic pattern, 38, 88, 194, 236 rhythmic structure, 267 rhythmic transformation, 241 rhythmic transition, 222, 245 rhythm setting, 59 Rilke, Maria Rainer, 46, 201 “rock ‘n’ roll,” 20 Rodin, Auguste, 59, 61, 221, 232, 233, 236, 237 Rosemont, Henry, Jr., 122 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 143–44n13, 183–84n18 Rubens, Peter Paul, 115, 274 Russell, Bertrand, 23, 25, 63n20 “safety nets,” 47–52, 131 Salinger, J. D., 242, 243 Salmon in the Trees: Life in Alaska’s Tongass Rain Forest (Troll and Gulick), 224, 226 Salome (Wilde), 47 Samsa, Gregor, 202 Sandburg, Carl, 42, 45, 84, 189, 272 Sanskrit, 18, 28 satirical allusion, 105 satirical parody, 191 “satori,” 123 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 12, 141, 180n1 scenes and scenarios, 81 scenic beauty, 166–67 Schwartz-Yeager, Brenda, 227 “The Scream”? (Much), 269 sectarian disagreements, 213–14 self-alienation, 202 self-consciousness, 18, 19, 124, 133, 134, 230 self-prophecy, 213 Seng, Zhao, 136, 137, 145n14, 217n8 sense-bewitching, 3, 4, 12, 13, 30, 52, 56, 91, 107, 126, 130, 131, 139, 160, 168, 169, 188, 207, 208, 212, 223, 231, 255 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 1, 182n13

319

“Shakespearean Rag,” 28, 48, 57, 85, 173, 177–79 Shapiro, Karl, 39 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 11 Siddhartha Gautama, 144–45n14, 217n8 silence, 117–21, 125, 136, 139, 172 Singer, Isaac B., 242, 243 Smith, Adam, 46 Smith, Allison, 241, 247n33 Snow Country (Kawabata), 67n77, 78n201, 169–70 social engagement, 51 Sonata quasi una fantasia (Beethoven), 178 Song, Qi, 166 “Song of Myself” (Whitman), 42, 55 Sophocles, 196 soul-appealing sounds, 253–56 soul-bewildering moment, 160, 169, 188 soul-soothing heartbeats, 16, 17, 52, 57 sound, 11; impact, 117, 128; message, 6, 7, 16, 17, 21, 22, 24, 31, 32; patterns, 16, 20, 84; rhythmical flow of, 87; role of, 25–30; of water, 260–62 The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd), 275, 276 speech acts, 12, 27, 47, 57, 82, 92, 93, 176 “The Spinoza of the City Market” (Singer), 243 spiritual ecology, 242 spiritual interpretation, 109, 194 St. Ambrose, the Archbishop of Milan, 108–9, 290, 296n71 Stanislavski, Konstantin, 203, 205 St. Augustine of Hippo, 108, 109, 193, 194, 212, 215 Sterne, Laurence, 31 Stevens, Wallace, 239 “still motion,” 155, 156, 158, 159, 237, 241; performative power of, 160–63; telltale signs of, 163–65; theoretical implication of use of, 165–67 Stocker, Bram, 47 “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (Frost), 43, 122, 123, 132, 184n19

320

Index

“The Story of an Hour” (Chopin), 125 St. Paul, 193 stress, 88 strict end rhyme patterns, 49, 58 Summa Theologica (Aquinas), 265, 293n43 Swift, Jonathan, 42, 55, 125, 196, 197 syllables, 2, 83, 197, 236, 275 syllables-counting approach, 49 symphonic tapestry, 48 “Symposium” (Plato), 9, 92, 183n18, 206 synaesthesia, 166–68, 188, 252, 253 synaesthetic quality, 48 syntactic order, 117 syntactic-prosodic structure, 7, 88, 133, 280 syntactic structure, 125 syntax, 25–27, 118, 126, 127, 255 synthesis, 81, 82, 99 technical language, 63n20 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 42, 47, 125, 197 text-enlivened/text-enlivening allusions, 10, 32, 36, 39, 127, 165 textual reality, 139, 210, 211 “the,” 157–60, 187–90, 200 thematic structure, 59 theme, 81 thesis, 81, 99 “The Thinker” (Rodin), 59, 61, 221, 232, 233 thinking process, 103 Thomas, Larry, x, 149n48 Thoreau, Henry David, 172, 193, 199, 201, 217n8 thunderclaps, 15, 21, 24, 28, 53, 54, 57, 204, 211, 238, 255, 265, 269, 276, 281, 286 Tibetan Buddhism, 242 “Tithonus” (Tennyson), 125, 197 Tongass of Alaska, 226, 227 “Tong Gan” (Qian, Zhongshu), 167, 253 Toulmin, Stephen, 206, 283

Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Wittgenstein), 183n14 tragic consequences, 113 tranquility, 59, 89, 163, 164, 166, 221, 222, 231 Treatise on the Origin of Language (Herder), 15 tribal relationships, 255 Tristan und Isolde (Wagner), 93, 96, 104, 105, 112 trisyllabic metric foot, 7 trochaic pattern, 133 Troll, Ray, 226 Trotter, David, 39 “true wit,” 30–33, 36, 261 turbulent emotion, 221 “The Two Large Forms” (Moore), 221, 233, 238–41, 244 “Ulysses” (Tennyson), 42 University Wits, 1, 276 “unnerving splendor,” 47–52 “unpremeditated accidental” allusions, 1, 6, 22, 30, 33, 37, 42, 57, 116, 128, 268 “Unreal City,” 44, 84, 85, 105–6, 118, 121, 123, 188, 206 Upanishads, 8, 15, 24, 28, 42, 57, 82, 92, 141, 143n13, 179, 183n18, 190, 204, 211, 222, 224–27, 231, 238, 251, 254, 265, 272, 276 “Venus of Willendorf,” 233, 234 verbal application, 91 verbal collage, 34 verbal communication, 92 verbal elements, 37, 83, 101, 128, 165, 266, 283, 289 verbal expressions, 31, 230, 256, 261, 266 verbal familiarity, 117 verbal flows, 23, 24, 39, 44, 47, 48, 89, 90, 100, 114, 127, 130, 212, 260, 263, 280

Index

verbal fluidity, 257, 264 verbal functionalism, 155, 157, 160 verbal images, 17, 63, 85, 119, 120, 221, 236, 239, 245 verbalization, 39, 46, 90, 100 verbal messages, 6, 24, 126, 239, 270 verbal music, 6, 20, 21, 23, 26, 31, 48–49, 67n77, 84, 85, 129, 130, 263, 267, 284 verbal network, 261, 262 verbal pattern, 93, 227, 231 verbal performances, 93 verbal phrases, 257, 260, 261, 267–68 verbal reality, 262 verbal structure/strings, 16, 20, 23, 25, 39, 43, 57, 84, 90, 93, 128, 200, 221, 261, 262 verbal transformation, 23, 29, 30, 32, 33, 38–40, 48, 52, 89, 90, 100, 101, 106, 107, 114, 115, 127, 128, 132, 139, 156, 159, 160, 186, 203; textoccasioned, 84 verbs, 114 Verdi, Giuseppe, 243 Verlaine, Paul, 89, 193, 215, 278 Violin Concerto in E minor (Mendelssohn), 244 visual illumination, 221 visual image, 45, 87, 120, 126, 130 visual quality, 48, 117, 126–31, 161 void: of chaos, 8–13, 30, 31; as matrix of substance and pattern, 13–15; of melting pot of allusions, 276–78 vowel sounds, 24, 262, 280 voyeurism, 188, 190, 195, 196, 199 Wagner, Richard, 10, 21, 38, 42, 93, 96, 105, 112, 189, 191, 192, 197, 210

321

Waiting for Godot (Buckett), 121, 125, 136, 152n72, 171, 174 The Walden (Thoreau), 199 w-alliterated words, 23, 128, 257–58 wall-mending scenario, 174–77 “Wandrers Nachtlied” (Goethe), 278, 279, 281 Wang, Robin, xv, 78n192, 229 “Water Music” (Handel), 191, 197, 211 weialala, 10, 21, 28, 37, 57, 189, 191, 192, 197, 222 Western civilization, 234 Western narrative culture, 207, 209, 225, 230 Western tradition, 56, 243 Whitman, Walt, 42, 55, 102 Wiesel, Elie, 243 Wilde, Oscar, 47, 96, 162 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1, 9–13, 21, 23, 25–27, 29, 30, 36, 40–42, 45, 57, 62, 65n31, 69n83, 86, 91, 92, 99, 110, 111, 114, 120, 121, 125–27, 136–38, 140, 143n12, 151n55, 157, 174, 178, 180n1, 183n14, 206, 242, 245, 249n36, 258, 261, 264, 277, 279, 283 Woolf, Virginia, 50, 51 Wordsworth, William, 251 Wright, James, 43, 122–24, 127, 132, 184n19 writerly reading, 7, 12, 32, 35–38, 43, 54, 102, 103, 106, 212, 223 yinyang, 55, 58, 85, 187, 212 “Yu Lou Chun” (Song, Qi), 166 Zhang, Longxi, 2, 154n82 Zhuangzi, 22, 68n78, 69n79, 111, 136– 38, 153n74, 160, 176, 188, 206, 214

About the Author

Shudong Chen is professor of humanities at Johnson County Community College, Overland Park, Kansas. A Chinese native born in Shanghai, he received his BA (1983) in English from Jilin University, China, and both his MA (1992) and PhD (1998) in English from the University of Kansas. He has been teaching courses in the humanities at JCCC since 1999, and his publications cover a broad range of subjects in the humanities including his monographic study Comparative Literature in the Light of Chinese Prosody with foreword from Roger T. Ames (2018) and Four Quartets in the Light of the Chinese Jar (2020) as a specific follow-up field-testing further the literary approach developed in the former. Since 2000, Dr. Chen’s research has concentrated on the cultural phenomena that reflect subtle but vital differences beneath well-observed similarities and essential but overlooked similarities behind noticeable differences. Since 2010, his research and publications concentrate further on literary studies as interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approaches to humanity especially in the light of Chinese prosody and with what Isaiah Berlin called “informed imagination.” Dr. Chen was one of five grants review panelists for the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2003.

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