Chaos and Disintegration
As 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. 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 assessment that “surely some revelation is at hand; / Surely the Second Coming is at hand”—i.e., 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 Mund” (spirit of the world)—“lion body and the head off a man / A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,” heading towards to the birthplace of Christ to supersede the Son before His final and triumphant return. In other words, Yeats’ 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’ sentiment and Remarque represented it in concrete, realistic terms—by recalling the bitterness of the first war and what it brought about.
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 cute, 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 grace, new life, re-birth. In the modern world, “there is no water” (ln. 38) and there is only “dry sterile thunder without rain” (ln. 21), and there is no society, no meaningful friendship as a result: for grace and life and baptism are the foundations of charity—and if they are...…a state for itself.
What Remarque showed in All Quiet on the Western Front and what Eliot showed in The Waste Land was that Yeats was right: “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, / The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned; / The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The anarchy was real—and the blood tide was still rising. Innocence was lost. Conviction was lost. Passion and frenzy were all that remained—and that was so at all levels of society—not just the low, but the upper levels, too. Eliot saw as much: he was one of the most well-read poets of the 20th century: he saw and felt which way the wind was blowing. “The Waste Land” was a reflection of what had come and what was coming down the lane behind it. It was more war, more destruction, more chaos, more emptiness, more isolation and desolation. The dropping of the atom bombs on Japan in 1945 would not be the end of the war but rather a new declaration of war—war on the gift of humanity, on the gift of life, on hope. From that point on, it would be nothing but continuous war—hot war, cold war, economic war, cultural war. And it still goes on today: the…
References
Fiero, G. (2010). The Humanistic Tradition. NY: McGraw-Hill.
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