What is most interesting about “The Waste Land”, is its relentless reliance on elements of the past. Of course, as much could arguably be said about any work of literature or history, and its intent seems perfectly reasonable given that, to put it simply, Eliot laments the present in favour of a more meaningful past. But it also seems to raise important questions about the nature of literature and its relationship to history, and the extent to which every literature is not in some sense a history, or wether literature and history are ever entirely set apart. Would, for instance, the philosopher’s best friend, an alien arriving on our planet with no prior knowledge of human history, be able to fully understand “The Waste Land” with no historical consciousness at all? Yes, he would likely understand it, but it is however improbable that he would achieve a complete understanding of the text and is conceded that its appeal may diminish in his estimation.
A close reading of “The Waste Land” reveals a history book in itself. A brief history; about post-14th century literature, mythology and antiquity, religion, some personal anecdotes, places (Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna and London, to cite a few), influential academic writing relevant to the period and preceding it, Art, popular culture, and other languages. It is a sort of concise compendium of History. Naturally, this would depend on your understanding of history. But if we consider History in a post-structuralist way, as a sort of creation stemming from the gradual piecing together of literary and historical evidence in order to create a contextual understanding of the past, then “The Waste Land” is a history in itself. From a literary point of view, if our friendly alien were to browse this poem in the spirit of Althussian symptomatic reading, he would then understand the text and its underlying conflicts of ideas that derive from external historical areas. The point is, “The Waste Land” is deeply historical and aside from being a piece of modernist history, it is also a piece of so many other histories crammed in a 434-lined poem.
This is not to say that Eliot has cleverly assembled pre-existing histories into a work of literature. There are many grey areas that are simply relevant to his waste land, bereft of any external influence other than that of his pen on paper. But what is interesting about “The Waste Land” is its relationship to the theoretical question of the association of literature to other fields of study. We have talked about history, and “The Waste Land” is a great example of literature as both a product and a contributor to its culture. There is both an abundance of accumulated facts in this poem, and a narrative that contributes to Eliot’s present, now become our past. It is a sort of cyclical historical field in which contextual information can tell us about literature in the same way literature can tell us new things about history, and the historical reality during which it was conceived and received.
Eliot's academic pursuits took him from Harvard to the Sorbonne and Oxford, eventually leading to his settlement in London. There, amidst the turmoil of war and personal distress, including an unhappy marriage and a psychological breakdown, Eliot composed “The Waste Land” during a recuperative stay in a Swiss sanatorium. Despite Eliot's own description of the poem as a minor, personal complaint, it resonated as a universal depiction of cultural crisis, articulating the desolation pervading the post-war world. But most importantly, “The Waste Land” is an early example of the idea that history is not a chronological sequence of events but a rather fragmented, periodic process. It is, in theory, a precursor of Foucault’s "epistemes" and the idea that the knowledge and cultural understanding of any given era are woven into literature, thereby making literary works not just products of a time but active participants in the shaping of historical consciousness.
Thanks to this poem, we know that Eliot read Baudelaire, Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and the Bible.This tells us not only about Eliot’s literary interests, but equally acts as a sort of mise en abyme. By this, I mean a reflection within a reflection, a literary work that not only contains references to other texts but also reflects on the very act of literary reference itself. It is a perfect example of the idea that there is nothing outside the text ("Il n'y a pas de hors-texte”, says Derrida), the idea that our understanding of reality is always mediated through text and language.
And this is what is modern about his poem. Its relationship to the past doesn’t make it anachronistic in the slightest. Quite the contrary; his intertextual engagements would have appealed to Gérard Genette (greatly influential French literary theorist), who defines various categories of transtextuality: intertextuality (the direct presence of one text within another) and hypertextuality (the relationship between a text and a preceding ‘hypotext’). Eliot's poem does not merely reference these works but recontextualises them within the interwar period, thereby creating a hypertext that dialogues with and transforms the hypotexts of its literary antecedents. This is the real modernist project: to transcends mimicry or homage by instead embodying a critical reflection on the act of literary creation itself.
Eliot’s intertextuality implies that the present is constructed upon the foundations of the past and that without the past, there can be no present as we understand it. It will always inform and influence the present. It is simultaneously one step behind and one step ahead. A sort of foot in both camps. As such, the past will always remain ‘relatively new’.