Chaos and Disintegration in Eliot, Remarque, and Yeats

The Center Cannot Hold: Yeats and the Interwar Vision

As W.B. Yeats noted in "The Second Coming," things fall apart when the center cannot hold. This was how Yeats characterized the seeming collapse of society between the Wars. The 1920s were Roaring in America — but that would end with a bust and a Great Depression. In Germany, the 1920s were abysmally bad: hyperinflation and immorality, the Cabaret, Anita Berber, poverty, prostitution, despair — that was life for Germans in the wake of the Versailles Treaty.

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," published in 1922, and Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) are two literary works that bear out Yeats's assessment that "surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand" — that is, that the end of times is near. Only, instead of Christ appearing on a cloud to judge mankind, it is the anti-Christ, the "Spiritus Mundi" (spirit of the world) — "lion body and the head of a man / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun" — heading towards the birthplace of Christ to supersede the Son before His final and triumphant return. In other words, Yeats's poem announces that the end may be near, but things are going to get much worse before they get better. Indeed, it was a prescient thought, as WWII broke out less than two decades later. Eliot echoed Yeats's sentiment, and Remarque represented it in concrete, realistic terms — by recalling the bitterness of the first war and what it brought about.

Eliot's Waste Land as Requiem for the Old World

Eliot provides a "requiem for a dry and sterile culture," as Fiero (2010) notes (p. 402), in "The Waste Land" — a poem that consists of fragments, throwbacks to other works from the past, from Dante to Shakespeare to the Bible. Eliot is looking at the post-WWI world and shaking his head at the ebullience and effervescence of the West as it celebrates its victory over Germany and blindly stumbles in its own self-righteousness, unaware of the corruption at its own heart.

The modern world had rejected the values of the Old World. It had jettisoned the past and now looked at itself as something whole, something special — not realizing it was like Frankenstein's monster: a pieced-together scrap heap of various parts trying to be whole and failing: "He who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying" (Eliot, 1922, ln. 8–9). In the Old World, water was the symbol of baptism — the symbol of grace, new life, and rebirth. In the modern world, "there is no water" (ln. 38), and there is only "dry sterile thunder without rain" (ln. 21). Without grace and life and baptism — the foundations of charity — there is no fellowship: "There is not even solitude in the mountains / But red sullen faces sneer and snarl / From doors of mudcracked houses" (ln. 22–24). Brother is turned against brother, so that each one stands in the other's way. There is no welcome, no happiness, no peace.

The splendor of the 1920s for the West was a façade, and Eliot knew it. He understood that what is past is prologue — and that the horrors of WWI were but a first chapter in a much larger work yet to play out. The misery visited upon the Europeans was not contained and not containable. It would spill out, as it did, in the 1930s. The Second World War would ultimately conclude the destruction of the Old World order in Europe. Eliot's Waste Land was thus a kind of dirge for the Old World — an acknowledgment of what Yeats had suggested: things were about to get much worse.

References

Fiero, G. (2010). The Humanistic Tradition. NY: McGraw-Hill.