Oh my god, I never thought to look at the Cliff Notes for the Wasteland. They must be spectacular. Can you imagine attempting to parse some kind of narrative coherence out of that?
I looked at Sparks notes actually, because free $$$$$ $$ free$$$$ but thank god i only have Prufrock to do (and a shitload of other shit. sobs. why is this my life)
Wasteland isn’t about narrative coherence; it’s about trying to piece together some sort of beauty and aesthetics from pre-existing canonical shizzle, if ‘tradition and the individual talent’ is to be believed, then he probably was trying to do precisely that while wiggling his way into canon itself.
The Wasteland is one part modernist deconstruction of the Fisher King myth, and two or three parts disastrous marriage with a woman he should never have married and refused to divorce.
Which really probably explains it better than anything.
God
…Why do I feel like this sums up most of modern literature.
Probably because modernism as a movement is really a cultural response to World War I. Basically the remains of an entire generation came staggering back from the most godawful experience in the history of mankind and then spent the next 25 years making traumatized art about it.
Except for Eliot, who dropped out of Oxford and married a woman because she was hot and gave him an excuse not to move back to the US, and then regretted it for the next 30 years.
(It sounds like she was in fact a hell of a cool lady and probably had crohn’s or something that got dismissed as ‘hysteria,’ but honestly Eliot was kind of a snobbish asshole, so.)
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/29nTEXh