瓦伦西亚大学教授如何解读艾略特的长诗《荒原》(全英文)(2)

Finally, the third part of the Introduction devotes just over 75 pages to a detailed, insightful and coherent close reading of the poem. Many ingenious metaphors have been invented to illustrate what happens in The Waste Land. My own personal choice is the archaeological site. The ultimate grace of the Eliot/Pound collage technique is that it confronts us with a field of confusing fragments that we need to reconstruct, fragments that happen to be the remains of earlier cultural continuities: the various traditions of the West, primitivism and the wisdom of the East. This act of reconstruction corresponds with the final phase of the Cubist aesthetics. After the painter has analyzed a scene, taken it apart and placed the pieces into a new design, the viewer must complete the process by recreating the original scene (or stimulus) from the confusing cues the painting provides. In the case of The Waste Land though, the original scene, or stimulus, is the whole expanse of Western culture. The reader, like an archaeologist at a dig, is forced to use every bit of intelligence, imagination and knowledge at his or her command to flesh out those fragments, reconstitute them and to recover, or maybe better, recreate the historical continuity those fragments are remnants of. There can be a virtually unlimited number of coherent and valid explications of the poem. But every one of them is, in effect, an individual step toward recovering the health—or the wholeness—of the waste land of Western society. In her particular unfolding of this enigmatic complex of language and cultural memory (and forgetfulness), Dr. Patea applies a fine imagination and a generous intelligence to the large body of knowledge that the first two sections of her essay display.

The Waste Land ends with an appeal to Buddhist and Hindu scriptures as offering a possible model for a cure to the spiritual aridity that is destroying the West:

大学教授Derrick对于《荒原》的详细解读

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con estos fragmentos a salvo apuntalé mis ruinas

Sea, pues, que habré de obligaros. Hierónimo esta furioso otra vez.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shanti shanti shanti (285) Paul Scott Derrick

The poem itself, in spite of its apparently chaotic fragmentation and pervasive air of pessimism, constitutes a journey from despair to hope. “La tierra baldía acaba”, writes Patea,

con un atisbo de lo trascendente y la aceptación de lo sagrado. [. . .] La verdad revelada conduce a la conciencia lírica a la realidad de lo inexpresable “donde el significado aún persiste aunque las palabras fallan” [. . .] El poema de Eliot traza el viaje del alma a través del desierto de la ignorancia, del sufrimiento y de la sed de las aspiraciones terrenales. Concluye con la revelación de una realidad que libera su condición fragmentada. En el misterio de la contemplación el ser intuye la plenitud de este estado de conciencia no dual y no objetivable. (170-71)

It is probably true that it began as an attempt to relieve “a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life” (Eliot 1971: 1). But Eliot is an artist whose individual mind came to accommodate the collective mind of his culture. This is an artist who taught himself to write, as he describes it in his early essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, “not only with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order” (Eliot 1964: 4).

His ‘insignificant grouse’ therefore inevitably transcends to a universal plane. The Waste Land is a prototype of the verbal collage, a case study of Eliot’s concept of the historical consciousness and the mythical method. It can be thought of as a puzzle to be solved, in which we solve—or resolve—ourselves. Or it might be thought of as a verbal field containing relics of all that we are losing—fragments, mixing memory and desire, forgetfulness and need, pointing us the way toward a new sense of wholeness.

Several worthwhile contributions to the general field of Eliot studies have been published in Spain (Gibert 1983; Abad 1992; Zambrano Carballo 1996; Vericat 2004), each one commendable in its own way. But this edition of The Waste Land seems to me to offer Spanish readers the best opportunity to appreciate and to comprehend all of the manifold dimensions of this towering signpost to the Modern (and post-modern) condition.

Works Cited

Abad, Pilar 1992: Cómo leer a T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Júcar.

Bolgan, Anne C. 1973: What the Thunder Really Said: A Retrospective Essay on the Making of “The Waste Land”. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP.

Eliot, T. S. 1964: Selected Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace & World, Inc.

———— 1971: The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

大学教授Derrick对于《荒原》的详细解读

Reviews

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Fraser, James George 1922: The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Abridged ed. New York: The MacMillan Co.

Gibert Maceda, María Teresa 1983: Fuentes literarias en la poesía de T. S. Eliot. Madrid: Ediciones de la Universidad Complutense.

Jain, Manju 1992: T. S. Eliot and American Philosophy: The Harvard Years. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.

Schusterman, Richard 1988: T. S. Eliot and the Philosophy of Criticism. New York: Columbia UP. Vericat, Fabio 2004: From Physics to Metaphysics: Philosophy and Allegory in the Critical Writings of T. S. Eliot. Valencia: Universitat de València, Biblioteca Javier Coy d’estudis nord-americans.

Weston, Jesse 1983 (1919): From Ritual to Romance. Gloucester MA: Peter Smith.

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