Pessimism and despair in T.S. Eliot's modernist poetry

¶ … Authors Are Obsessed With the Gloomier Aspects of Life

It is certainly true that many modern authors seem to be concerned with the "gloomier" or more pessimistic view of life. However there is a good reason for this which can only be understood once we have insight into the context and the time in which they write. The term 'modernism' is associated with the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries. Writers and artists tended to reflect on the world around them and to question the societies or the environment and governments of the time. An important part of the function of the artist is to criticize the status qua or the world in which he or she lives and to explore and search for answers to the problems that they see facing society. The modernist period was also period of great change and interrogation of the accepted norms and traditions of the past. This was also a time of great change in world history. In this essay I will be analyzing works by T.S. Eliot and Joseph Conrad in relation to their social and historical milieu.

T.S. Eliot and the Wasteland

T.S. Eliot is seen as one of the great poets and writers of early modernism. He has often been called the artistic spokesman for the way artists of the time perceived and understood the world. Eliot was one of many artists, writers and poets who were of the opinion that the modern world was essentially a moral, spiritual and psychological "Wasteland." Their view was that the modern world and modern western society had lost its direction and had become meaningless and empty. This critical and "gloomy" attitude was an essential part of the modernist movement in art.

Like so many of his contemporaries, Eliot, was influenced by the philosophical, scientific as well as psychological and sociological upheaval in Western society. Like W.B. Yeats he saw the present period of contemporary history as a cul de sac; an era which was severely lacking in the ancient traditional richness of knowledge of the past and which was apocalyptic in its loss of meaning and inner coherence. "Eliot, in his 1923 review of Joyce's Ulysses, called contemporary history an immense panorama of futility and anarchy." (Spears 1994, p. 101)

It is sometimes not often perceived just how much the First World War and the upheaval in the cultural traditions and history affected modernist poets like T.S. Eliot. The following extract outlines something of this background.

The unprecedented catastrophe that led to Versailles had destroyed not only the people and the land, but the culture and institutions of Europe. Most of the once great and ancient houses of European royalty were dissolved and scattered in the wind. The context of this calamity must include the scientific, philosophic, and religious revolutions that were collapsing the intellectual structures that had undergirded the Western mind for centuries. The desolation, too well-known to be discussed in detail, received consummate expression in the Wasteland.

The Wasteland is a very bitter and caustic poem which, through stark and harsh imagery, conveys a view of a modern world without any essential meaning and in which the individual has lost all direction and purpose. This sense of ennui and existential angst is related to the situation an entire generation after the "Great War" or First World War. There was a general feeling at that time that human governments and authorities had become corrupt and power hungry and that civilization had lost any claim to higher moral standards. In the Wasteland, the poet creates a poetic view of a world without traditional or contemporary structures or modes of meaning which is merely a collection of "broken images"; and this is the thematic that runs throughout the poem.

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain

Joseph Conrad

It is interesting that Eliot uses the most important words from Conrad's Heart of Darkness in his poem the Wasteland. Eliot had also been in ill health before writing the poem and something of the connection between the themes explored by the two writers can be seen from the following quotation.

The Waste Land was drafted during a rest cure at Margate ("I can connect / Nothing with nothing") and Lausanne ("In this decayed hole among the mountains") during the autumn of 1921 by a convalescent preoccupied partly with the ruin of post-war Europe, partly with his own health and the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London, partly with a hardly exorable apprehension that two thousand years of European continuity had for the first time run dry. It had for epigraph a phrase from Conrad's Heart of Darkness ("The horror! The horror!"); embedded in the text... " (Kenner 1959, p. 145)

Conrad, like many modernists, had an essentially pessimistic view of the potential of human nature for greed and cruelty. His work the Heart of Darkness explores this "darkness" in human nature. The book is also a critique of modern society in that it takes place during the early years of the British colonization of Africa. An important part of the novel is Conrad's view of colonization as a cruel enterprise concerned only with power and money and having nothing to do with helping" or 'uplifting" the African people. Like Eliot, Conrad too paints a literary picture of society which has lost meaning ands has become empty and vacuous in a moral and spiritual sense.

While the book is intensely " gloomy" in its assessment of modern society and the contemporary man it also searches for alternatives and a way out of the ' modern predicament'. The central focus of the book is the search for self and identity and an attempt to answer the question of what happens when men leave the protective normative and restraining influence of society. The central figure of Kurtz is a man who has broken free of the constraints of a sick society. However the novel also questions whether Kurtz too has become evil and lost his own sense of direction. The question is posed questions whether the human "heart of darkness" is not the real problem. If one interprets the book from this perspective, as a work that states that human nature or the human heart is essentially flawed, then one could conclude that Heart of Darkness is in fact more gloomy or pessimistic then the Wasteland.

The Heart of Darkness is a complex work that can be interpreted on many different levels: psychological, sociological, ethical and political. The two central characters are in search of meaning and identity outside of the parameters and prescriptions of society. This theme is succinctly stated in the following quotation: "During Marlow's mission to find Kurtz, he is also trying to find himself... Conrad tries to show us that Marlow is what Kurtz had been, and Kurtz is what Marlow could become." (Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now)

Marlow is fascinated by Kurtz. The figure of Kurtz is the mysterious centre of the novel as he stands outside society - someone who has broken with the restrictions, norms and ethics and entered into the unknown. In an important sense the book is about the exploration of the true nature of humanity when it is no longer bound by society.

Another view is that Kurtz transcended the society from which he originated and seen through the lie of that society; namely the lies of Colonialism. The view that Kurtz is insane is often referred to. The aura of Kurtz's depravity and his apparent lack of conventional moral integrity, according to the tenets of society expressed by Conrad, are reflected in the novel. "His... nerves went wrong, and caused him to preside at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rights, which... were offered up to him." (Conrad, 208)

When Marlow encounters Kurtz he finds an individual who cannot be categorized in societal terms and who seems to exist beyond this world. Marlow's response to this "apparition" is to realize that Kurtz has looked into himself and discovered the horror of his own self

But his soul was mad. Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself, and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had -- for my sins, I suppose -- to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. (Conrad 145)

Fundamentally this work addresses the central questions facing society and the individual in modern times. Both Eliot and Conrad are "gloomy" in that they see through and critically analyze the world and the society around them. Their pessimism is a necessary critique and reaction to the world. However Eliot, more than Conrad, provides alternatives and seeks for new possibilities.