MB UNIUD

Michael H. Levenson starts his analysis about the first stanza of The Waste Land underlining immediately the theme of death and life, conveyed by the subject of the stanza (season and especially Spring) expressed by a very important semantic field ("dead land," "spring rain," "little life," "dried tubers") and the past participles. He also consider another important aspect: the narrator. Reading the first lines the reader can only found an unspecified "us". The reader becomes curious and probably he wants to know more about this "us". He can find more information in the following lines: this pronoun refers both to winter and summer and then to a series of verbs at a past tense (instead of past participles). The reader can also understand that the narrator is referring to a particular day in the Hofgarten: the memory doesn't only deal with nature but also with the "city".

But at the 12^th line the expectations of the reader seem to loose significance because of a line in German. Even if it has been already anticipated with some German words, this sentence seems to destroy all possibility of a fragile continuity in these few lines. We cannot even understand who says that line: is it the narrator, another person who speaks while the poet is writing or maybe a memory? Levenson thinks that we have to consider it as a inassimilable poetic datum, since there is the total absence of a context. Anyway after that line, everything seems to return as before (first-person plural; pattern of conjunction and other aspects that convey an idea of continuity).

Using a simple diagram Levenson tries to demonstrate the conjunction between apparently different lines.

§       Lines 1-6 are linked by the use of present participles

§       Lines 5-18 are linked by personal pronouns

§       Lines 8-12 by the use of German

§       Lines 10-16 are linked by the reiteration of the conjunction "and."

All these aspect represent the continuity of the poem, that is anyway not "total". There are some feature findable only in some pairs of lines, they are not present in the whole poem. Levenson has another doubt about the narrator: is he unique or does he change during the poem? Does Marie coincide with the narrator? Is it possible that the voice that has told the paradox: April is cruel, says now such conversational banalities as: "In the mountains, there you feel free"?

Levenson agrees with the idea of several voices, even if he can't definitely demonstrate it and especially he doesn't know when a point of view (and so a narrator, a voice) begins or ends.

This reflection underlines an important difference between Eliot and his contemporaries (for example James and Conrad): there is no dominance of the individual subject... In The Waste Land the characters can neither provide coherence and continuity for the poem!

Anyway the use of different points of view is very interesting, because they underline Eliot's idea that the search of an absolute order is not necessary or maybe it doesn't even exist. As a matter of fact Eliot himself said that

the pre-established harmony is unnecessary if we recognize that the monads are not wholly distinct.

Following Levenson's point of view, also repetitions are connected to this meaning: they remember us the question: How can one finite experience be related to any other? Levenson finds an answer in Eliot's sentence: individual experiences and personalities are distinct, but not wholly so.

Since the point of view are not recognizable, we can say that they are not just juxtaposed, but interpenetrate. The role of Tiresias in the poem is an argumentation for the same thesis. As Levenson says his role is not as a consistent harmonizing consciousness but as the struggled-for emergence of a more encompassing point of view. The order of The Waste Land depends just on the series of points of view that look for a unity and after that go past that unity.