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Citizenship in Heaven and Earth: Contesting Nationalism in The Waste LandAuthor(s): Srila NayakSource: Modern Philology, Vol. 109, No. 2 (November 2011), pp. 221-244Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/663189.

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Citizenship in Heaven and Earth: Contesting

Nationalism inThe Waste Land

S R I L A N A Y A K

Chicago

Our citizenship is in heaven; yes, but that is the model and type foryour citizenship upon earth.

(T.S.ELIOT, Choruses from The Rock)1

Max Webers The City(1921) anticipates Eliots The Waste Land(1922) bothin its perception of the city as the center of Western civilization and itsattention to the social and political stratification of human identities thathave characterized the Occidental city throughout its history. Webers socio-logical history traces the evolution of the modern Western city through

forms of citizenship and economic entitlements, from ancient communitiesto the corporation of citizens and thence to the increasing complexity ofthe oppositions between citizens and noncitizens, slave and free labor,unfree industrial workers and enfranchised semicitizens or metics.2 InEliots poem, forms of postwar citizenship and a new experience ofnational illegitimacy in a postimperial and postwar Europe collide withother fragmented identities from a Roman imperial past. While The WasteLandshares some evident affinities with the depiction of urban alienationand atomization in Georg Simmels Metropolis and Mental Life (1903),

at another level the poem takes a comprehensive view of history, time, and

2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0026-8232/2011/10902-0004$10.00

I thank Kirk Melnikoff and Lara Vetter for their painstaking and immensely helpful read-ings of my essay. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers and to Lisa Ruddick, the as-sociate editor ofModern Philology, for their valuable suggestions.

1. T. S. Eliot,Choruses from The Rock, inComplete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot(London:Faber & Faber, 1969), 151.

2. Max Weber, The City(Glencoe: Illinois Free Press, 1958), 213. Weber defines the meticasan enfranchised semicitizen who enjoyed a status that was distinctly different from that of theslaves. Although free like the citizen, themetichad to pay taxes to enter into the economic life

of the city.

221

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sociopolitical identities that bears comparison with Webers work. In whatfollows, I will suggest that The Waste Land, in its expansive orientation,aligns the forms of individuality, citizenship, and community in the me-

tropolis with the imperial and Christian traditions of Europe. Much ofEliots subsequent cultural criticism emphasizes that the history of liberalcitizenship, with its gradual separation from a European Christian tradition,eventually ruins community and nation-state.3 Eliot shares with Weber asense of the constrained human existence in the metropolis as well as anawareness that the metropolis and its subjects emerged from complexglobal historical and cultural antecedents.

The relationship between modernist poetics and nationalist preroga-tives remains an unanalyzed component of Eliots famed antiliberalism.

Much criticism focuses on Eliots antiliberalism through the structure ofcontradictions that dominate his poetics and politics. Jeffrey Perl and Mi-chael North focus on the tensions between Eliots conservatism and thosephilosophical beliefs he held that were antithetical to the core elements ofconservatism. In a comprehensive and sympathetic assessment, Perl arguesfor the consistency of Eliots antiliberal politics and his philosophical posi-tion: But however one comes to judge Eliots politics, it must be admittedthat Eliot himself found no inconsistency, chiefly, it appears, because heviewed the connection drawn between skepticism and liberalisma con-nection cherished both by liberals and conservativesas a fraud.4 While

Perl argues that Eliots philosophical skepticism contributes to a morecomplex system than the category of conservatism allows for, North con-cludes that Eliots relativism is a part of his conservative thought, mostvividly underlined in his rejection of fascism, which is motivated by Eliotsadherence to the monarchy and the Church.5 My essays argument centerson Eliots opposition to liberalisms theory of nationalism and nationality,

3. InThe Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot argues that a democracy without the positive force

of Christianity was vulnerable to an easy transformation by totalitarianism: If you will not haveGod you should pay your respects to Hitler and Stalin (T. S. Eliot, The Idea of a Christian Society,inChristianity and Culture: The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes towards the Definition of Culture[New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1940], 33). Christopher Dawson, a figure whose conservativethought had a powerful influence upon Eliot, wrote in the Criterionabout points of contactbetween liberalism and totalitarianism: The essential principle of the Totalitarian State was,in fact, asserted by Liberalism before Fascism was ever heard of (The Totalitarian State, Cri-terion14, no. 54 [1934]: 3). Like Dawson, Eliot points out that liberalism was ultimately led byforces of modernization into a cul-de-sac of mechanized or brutalized control and ends uplending itself to philosophies which deny it (Idea of a Christian Society, 14).

4. Jeffrey Perl, Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and after Eliot(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1989), 89.5. Michael North, The Political Aesthetic of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound(Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 104.

222 M O D E R N P H I L O L O G Y


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crucial aspects of his antiliberalism that have not been sufficiently exam-ined.

In the first section, I analyze the older Anglican poets reaction against

liberal and totalitarian nationalism through his construction of an anti-utilitarian identity that tries both to encompass and to bypass the nation-state.In the second section I investigateThe Waste Lands intersecting planes ofmetropolitan temporality and European tradition, the latter primarily con-stituted by the works of Augustine and Dante, and suggest how we mightunderstand the enigmatic form of postwar identity that the poem placesbefore us. My intention is to offer a nuanced analysis of the multiple affilia-tions between Eliots poetic imagination of personal and political identityin postwar Europe and the counters of religion, empire, and cosmopolitan-

ism. All three, especially religion and the ideal of imperial infinitude, func-tion as antidotes to nationalism in Eliots poetry and prose, yet they workdiversely in contradictory directions. An understanding of Eliots critiqueof nationalism necessarily entails a reexamination of the nature and degreeof his imaginative and political investment in the ideologies of empire,nation-state, and Christianity, each of which represents a different form ofallegiance and community. Critical assessments of the works of an AnglicanEliot have usually pointed to the parallels that he sees among the authori-tarian structures of nation-state, empire, and Christianity. However, studiesofThe Waste Lands modernism have exclusively focused on its elegiac rep-

resentation of Roman and British imperial cultures and have not analyzedthe poem as a site of religious imagination, believing the latter to be pre-dominantly manifested in the works of an older, orthodox poet. Eliots aes-thetic and political opposition to postwar nationalism enables us to movebeyond the traditional critical opinion of a nexus between an idealizedempire and Christianity in Eliots oeuvre and reinterpret the relations be-tween the two. Specifically, this essay explores how Eliots approach to anti-national forms of community can help us recognize multiple and conflic-tual relations between imperial ideology and Christian ethos in The Waste

Landand between Christian identity and national identity in Eliots laterprose. The great interest of Eliots work lies in the way in which, as Ray-mond Williams pointed out, it resists both the complacencies of liberal-ism and complacent conservatism.6 I hope to clarify the political andhistorical structures in Eliots work that displace, embrace, and sublimatehegemonic entities of nation and empire and to shed light on certain cate-gories of political exclusion and inclusion that were entailed by twentieth-century modernity.

6. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 17801950(New York:Columbia University Press,1983), 243.

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C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D N A T I O N A L I S M

The complex of ideas surrounding the relation of tradition and nationalidentity in Eliots later work offer a way to better understand The Waste Landspolitics of antinationalism. While criticism on Eliot has focused intently onthe compound of opposites that constitutes his definition of tradition inTradition and the Individual Talent (191920), not much attention hasbeen paid to how Eliots conception of citizenship or his later self-representa-tion as Anglican and British subject derives from this relation of oppositions.The 1939 Idea of a Christian Society(included in the 1940 collection Christian-ity and Culture) offers Eliots most cogent commentary on the relationsamong individual, nation, and church. Alan Marshall suggests that Eliotsdevelopment as a writer from The Waste Landon is governed by his changing

relationship to EnglandEngland understood as the religious, secular, andinstitutional forces of the nation-state.7While mainly correct, Marshalls conten-tion does not quite explain how Eliots understanding of the self s relation-ship to church, community, and nation is forged in relation to the particu-larizing force of nationalism, an ideology that Eliot manifestly repudiated.

The interaction between the particular and the universal that character-ized Eliots conception of tradition also characterized his understandingof political identity in a manner that pitted the tradition of institutionalAnglicanism against liberal as well as totalitarian nationalism. In short, the

nation-state of England provides a material and institutional context tothe relation between the individual and the force of tradition that had ap-peared in Eliot writings, at least since the publication of Tradition and theIndividual Talent and The Waste Land.8 The burden on Eliot during thewar years and after was to demonstrate that the nation-state to which the cit-izen had sworn allegiance was more than the sum total of nationalist ideol-ogies that bedeviled it. Instead, the individual needed to forge a relation-ship with a tradition that both represented the particular nation and yetwas independent of it. Eliot linked citizenship ontologically and concep-tually with Anglicanism, a philosophical system that rebelled against both

left and right political values.

7. Alan Marshall, England and Nowhere, in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, ed.A. D. Moody (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 96.

8. Andrew John Miller argues that the dichotomous logic of tradition and individualtalent constitutes both a desire for autonomy and a market-driven professionalism that iscompatible with Eliots later attempts to negotiate the tensions between the aspirations of apersonal self and the cultural fixities enjoined by church and the nation-state. Millers argu-ment contextualizes the contradictions in Eliots vocation of modernist aesthetics in terms ofthe older Anglican Eliots reconciliation of institutional contingency and spiritual purity

(Compassing Material Ends: T. S. Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and the Nation-State,ELH67[2000]: 234, 241). Millers penetrating study has been helpful to my analysis of the conflictthat Eliot stages betweenChristianity and the ideology of nationalism.



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Eliots insistence on becoming a member in a national church, as anecessary aspect of his new nationality, was a direct consequence of hisattack on the purely functional outlook of both liberalism and totalitarian-

ism. For Eliot, a liberal theory of state and citizens results in a paradoxicalinsistence on the right of private life, rendered smaller and smaller bythe encroachment ofetatisme, which seems to be the last word on the secu-larized relation between the state and civil life. Citizenship in a totalitarianstate, according to Eliot, is a direct consequence of the destruction of thecivic function of the church: One of the causes of the totalitarian State isan effort of the State to supply a function which the Church has ceased toserve; to enter into a relation to the community which the Church hasfailed to maintain; which leads to the recognition as full citizens only of

those who are prepared to accept it in this relation.

9

Ones national be-longing then comes to represent for Eliot the sphere that most visiblyreflected the effects of both the manipulative powers of totalitarianism andthe inadequacies of functional and utilitarian liberalism and conservatismto combat it. Eliot believed that the purely functional aspirations of post-Enlightenment ideologies had resulted in an acutely reductive and radicaltransformation of the nature of man and his relations with institutions andhis community. If a prominent experience of modernity was the manner inwhich religion was subsumed either under secularism or the state as liberal-ism and totalitarianism respectively saw fit, then Eliot believed this func-

tional relativism was a result of the complete misunderstanding of the roleand purpose of religion. Thus, for Eliot, liberalism and totalitarianism wereconnected to each other by the bridge of a functional context whereby, asHannah Arendt points out in a related context, whatever fulfills the func-tion of a religion is a religion.10

As a recent British subject, Eliots reflections on a Christianized Englandand Europe came to revolve around the subject-citizen first as a historicalentity in civic and national terms and then as an embodiment of the princi-ple of a transcendent life of faith, constituting a community that went

beyond the nation-state to encompass the Christian order of Europe. As lateas 1951, Eliot writes thus about Virgils representation of an ideal of empirethat constructs a common citizenship for Europe: For Virgils consciousmind, it [destiny] means the imperium romanum. . . .You must rememberthat the Roman empire was transformed into the Holy Roman Empire.What Virgil proposed to his contemporaries was the highest ideal even foran unholy Roman Empire, for any merely temporal empire. We are all, sofar as we inherit the civilization of Europe, still citizens of the Roman

9. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 53.10. Hannah Arendt,Between Past and Future: Six Essays in Political Thought(New York: Vi-

king, 1961), 102.



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Empire.. . .It remains an ideal, but one which Virgil passed on to Christi-anity to develop and cherish.11 For Frank Kermode, Eliots career, espe-cially his work with the Criterion, attests to a belief that modern men

[ought] to be members of a larger polity than that of their own provinceto accept their nationality yet aspire to membership of a more abstractempire embodied in Latin Europe.12 The sentiment of nationalism thusbecomes a disruptive force that not only inhibits a citizen-subjects alle-giance to a universal church and empire but also strips Christian subjectsof their rights within the states network of secular institutions, graduallyreducing them to the status of a tolerated minority.13

At the same time that he opposed nationalism, Eliot was also reluctantto frame national identity in the light of the ethics of liberal cosmopolitan-

ism or universalism.

14

One of his pieces for theCriterionillustrates well theparticular nature of the universalism that Eliot reads into a Christian ver-sion of citizenship, something quite distinct from the secular humanist uni-versalism espoused by institutional bodies such as the League of Nations inpostwar Britain. While Miller correctly notes that for Eliot it is only theinternational dimension of Christianity that makes possible a civilized so-ciety outside the sphere of nationalism, the relationship between politicaland philosophical elements in this version of humanist Christian citizen-ship still remains to be analyzed.15 In the January 1936 issue of theCriterion,in an editorial on the subject of Italys invasion of Abyssinia, Eliot refers to

manifestos from the Right, the Left, and the Catholics in France. He offers aqualified sympathy for the Rights disapproval of the inconsistency in Brit-ain and Frances opposition to themission colonialeof another great nationof kindred culture. He also agrees with the charge of the Right that theconfused mixture of secular and spiritual motives of the League of Nationshas put higher and lower civilizations, superior and inferior nations on the

same level.16 Eliot ultimately reserves his approval for the Catholic mani-festo: the French Rights high moral tone is ultimately empty, compro-mised by its material interests in colonialism; the Catholic manifesto, how-

11. T. S. Eliot, Virgil and the Christian World, in On Poetry and Poets(London: Faber &Faber, 1957), 12930.

12. Frank Kermode, introduction toSelected Prose of T. S. Eliot(New York: Harcourt BraceJovanovich, 1975), 21.

13. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 18.14. Ibid., 46. Andrew Miller, similarly, points out that Eliot ultimately proves unwilling to

accept any vision of social integration that rests upon post-Christian assumptions. He has littleuse for secular theologies that imagine the world to be engaged in the process of transcendingall historically particularized forms of religious belief and to be steadily advancing toward a uni-versal religion rooted in a common humanity (Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and the Nation-

State, 25051).15. Miller, Eliot, Christian Pluralism, and the Nation-State, 251.16. T. S. Eliot, A Commentary, Criterion15, no. 59 (1936): 26668.



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ever, represents for Eliot a higher morality singularly concerned with theiniquity of the war of aggression. Unlike the Right, French Catholics arenot interested in identify[ing] Christianity with the maintenance of a par-

ticular social and political regime, or with the hegemony of Europe overthe rest of the world.17

Nevertheless, Eliots politics resist the abstract humanist aims of theFrench Catholics. Eliot contradicts the Catholic doctrines at the same timethat he expresses agreement with them. Thus, humanist Catholicism errsonly when, like the League of Nations, it speaks of the equality of races:There will probably always remain a real inequality of races, as there isalways inequality of individuals. But the fundamental identity in humanitymust always be asserted, as must the equal sanctity of moral obligation to

people of every race. All men are equal before God; if they cannot all beequal in this world, yet our moral obligation towards inferiors is exactly thesame as that towards our equals.18 Eliot assumes that his perspective risesabove the expedient politics of both left-wing and right-wing factions. Ulti-mately, his view comes across as an interpretation of the philosophy ofF. H. Bradley, the Victorian antiutilitarian philosopherand the subject ofEliots dissertationwho implied that one could believe anything abouttemporal particularities as long as one also professed a belief in the unionof these particularities in the figure of the Absolute.19 This doctrine of racialexceptionalism paradoxically becomes the condition for a metaphysical

inclusiveness. In Choruses from The Rock(1934) Eliot writes:

What life have you if you have not life together?There is no life that is not in community,And no community not lived in praise of GOD.20

For Eliot, as Terry Eagleton observes, conservatism is what stays outsidepolitics; its beliefs are not political beliefs but principles of the fundamental

horizon of communal life.21 In The Idea of a Christian Society, Eliot advocates aChristianity [that] is communal before being individual, and in 1939 this

position embodies Eliots reduced ambitions for Christianity as a nonnation-

17. Ibid., 268.18. Ibid., 269.19. Francis Herbert Bradley observes, The Absolute is not shut up within our human lim-

its (Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay[Oxford: Clarendon, 1969], 256). The thrustof the dialectic in Appearance and Realityis toward losing ones character in the Absolute and atransforming into a fragment of higher truth (260). Thus, various appearances come to-gether to form a whole in the Absolute, where the human mind accepts as reality both finiteexperiences and experiences that cannot be reconciled with the individuals world. Throughhis study of appearances, Bradley strives to attain a higher perception of the Absolute,

where individuality is gained without forfeit of variety (271).20. Eliot, Choruses from The Rock, 152.21. Terry Eagleton, Nudge-Winking, London Review of Books, September 19, 2002, 67.



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alist form of community.22 Nonetheless, the example above indicates thatEliots abstract empire of Christianity not only is differentiated from thepolitics of nationalism but also contains internal contradictions, as Eliots

aspirations for a transnational community is undermined by his politics ofexclusivism. Thus, Eliots idea of a Christian community is opposed not justto nationalism but also, ultimately, to his own vision of an imagined citizen-ship on earth in accordance with divine principles, as expressed in Choruses(see epigraph). As his commentary in theCriterionreveals, Eliot insists upona separation between citizenship in Gods kingdom and citizenship in thisworld and, thus, ultimately creates a dualism between a vision of a cosmo-politan Christian unity and the negation of this very vision in the larger con-text of twentieth-century colonialism.

A N T I N A T I O N A L I S M I N T H E W A S T E L A N D

Eliots affiliation with Anglicanism after 1927 bears witness to his antago-nism to nationalism and to his fundamental opposition to liberalisms es-pousal of the nation as product and condition of the secular and collectivewill of the people. A secular notion of cosmopolitan humanism is not anally of Eliots antinationalism but a provocation, an identity that Eliotswhite British Anglicanism must overrule.The Waste Landresponds to liber-alisms theory of anti-imperial nationalism, a key principle in the Treaty of

Versailles (1919), which formed the basis for reconstruction of Europesnational borders. While critics tend to separate the earlier poet ofThe WasteLandand the later Anglican poet, Eliots critical and creative output fromThe Waste Landonward must grapple with imagining an identity that wouldtranscend postwar ideologies of national identity and nation-state. Like theAnglo-Catholicism expressed in Eliots work after 1927, imperialism inTheWaste Land is represented as a constitutive part of European tradition

menaced and undone by postwar nationalism.23 The poems modernism isshaped by a confrontation between universality, as represented in the works

of Augustine and Dante, and the territorial-political coercions of nationalistidentity. Eliots critique of postwar liberal nationalism results in an idealizedinterpretation of the Roman empire as a transnational political formation,which, in turn, is challenged by the poems adaptation of Augustines anti-imperial stance inThe City of God. A close attention to the complexities ofEliots rejection of nationalism reveals thatThe Waste Landboth accommo-

22. Eliot, Idea of a Christian Society, 47.23. Frank Kermode provides a very helpful summary of the points of contact between

Eliots Christianity and his poetic incorporation of the ideal of empire after 1927. According

to Kermode, Eliots conservative-imperialist politics, like his Catholic Christianity, comesto be eventually expressed in terms of a scholastic sense of the complexities of time and eter-nity (Kermode, introduction to Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, 17).



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dates an affinity to the legacy of the Roman empire and yet resists this modeof imperial representation when it consorts with an Augustinian vision ofChristian universality.

As Michael Levenson has observed, the poems representation of thecity as a site of political, economic, and imperial influences can also betraced to Eliots internationalism between 1919 and 1921.24 Historians andpolitical scientists have generally viewed this as the high period of Euro-pean nation building, marked by the resurgence of nationalist ideologiesacross Central and Eastern Europe and the dismantling of the Austrian,Ottoman, and Russian empires. The codification of liberal nationalism inthe postwar peace treaty of Versailles, that appalling document as Eliotlabeled it, led to the decisive displacement of empire by rapidly formed

nation-states in Europe after 1918.

25

The Waste Lands internationalism liesin its attention to the changing map of Europe that divides an imperial pastfrom a nationalist present and in a critique of postwar nationalism in Eu-rope that, in effect, amounts to a rejection of the peace treatys vision of anew Europe. Benedict Anderson views this new form of globalization, be-ginning in the mid-nineteenth century and consolidated in the years follow-ing the First World War, as primarily constituted by the rising significanceof nation-states in global affairs. The ascendance of nation-states as the finalpolitical form of universality takes shape in the aftermath of the postwar col-lapse of multiple European empires and the formation of the League of

Nations, which compelled remaining empires to masquerade as nation-

24. Michael Levenson, DoesThe Waste LandHave a Politics?Modernism/Modernity6, no.3 (1999): 113.

25. T. S. Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, February 22, 1920, in Letters of T. S. Eliot,vol. 1, 18981922,ed. Valerie Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1988). Liberal nationalism has itsroots in nineteenth-century classical liberalisms threshold principle for national self-deter-mination, which recognized national sovereignty for a sufficiently large people who alreadyhad a historic association with a state and territory ; smaller nationalities or communitieswould eventually be absorbed or assimilated into larger nations (E. J. Hobsbawm,Nations and

Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality[Cambridge University Press, 1990], 131). Fol-lowing the war, liberal nationalism was defined as the alignment of territorial borders and ho-mogeneous ethnic and linguistic communities to create postimperial independent nation-states for different nationalities. The Treaty of Versailles aligned the nineteenth-century ideaof national self-determination with a nationalist logic as it tried to ensure sovereign statusfor minority and oppressed populations through its reliance upon ethnic and linguistic factorsto determine the composition of existing and new nation-states. Thus, the treatys enforce-ment of an anti-imperial principle of self-determination in order to create liberal nation-statesacross Central and Eastern Europe, following the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov,Hohen-zollern, and Ottoman empires, was obviously an attempt to recreate the foundational princi-ple of fully developed Western nation-states of France and Britain that had successfully com-

bined nationality and state, factors that had always remained separate in the multi-nationalpolities of Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia (Hannah Arendt,The Origins of Totalitarian-ism[New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951], 231).



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states.26 The Waste Lands response to the seismic shift from empire tonations represents modernisms engagement with forces of global transfor-mation.27

Simon Gikandi emphasizes a distinctive topology for reading that isrequired for post-imperial sites of crisis, which are constituted by relationsbetween colonial pasts or imperial cultures and the unstable present ofa disappearing imperialism, that ill-defined space in which the experienceof empire and its long past seem to cast an aura which is also an anxiety overcontemporary culture.28 InThe Waste Land, metropolitan borders cannotbe hermetically sealed off from postwar Europe, and a devastated andghostly London is a reflection both of the collapse of empires in Europeand of the encroaching formation of national affiliations and homogeneous

nations across Europe. As a premature post-imperial polis

29

haunted byghostly fragments of Europes imperial tradition, London is constituted as asite of crisis by the violence of the passage from empire to nation making inpostwar Europe. The poems swarming hooded hordes30 underscore thecontested and spectral frontiers that accompany the reconstruction of terri-torial borders as empires transform into nation-states in Eastern Europe.

IfThe Waste Landconsists in searching out the absence of the imperialidea, as Marshall has noted, then surely its participation in the postwarhistorical transition from a disintegrating transnational empire to insularnation-state helps to explain the poems nostalgia for empire.31 David

26. Benedict Anderson, introduction toMapping the Nation, ed. Gopal Balakrishnan (NewYork: Verso, 1995), 117.

27. Melba Cuddy-Keane points out that modernism contributes to an emerging globalconsciousness in the early twentieth century and influences, as well as is shaped by, the transi-tion from an era of hegemonic economic globalization to a modernity characterized by cul-tural globalization (Modernism, Geopolitics, Globalization,Modernism/Modernity10 [2003]:540). A number of assertions have been made about the qualified nature of Eliots modernistinternationalism and its differences from cosmopolitanism. Sheldon Pollock regards Eliotslifelong preoccupation with Virgils thought and poetry as a provincial vision of a Euro-pean comprehensive universalism (Cosmopolitan and Vernacular in History, inCosmopoli-

tanism, ed. Carol Breckenridge, Homi K. Bhabha, Sheldon Pollock, and Dipesh Chakrabarty[Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002], 29). Rebecca L. Walkowitz points out that whileThe Waste Lands wide-ranging cultural and literary coverage presents a certain internationalistliterary practice, the poem is devoid of a concern with those ethics of cosmopolitanism thatcontest fixed conceptions of the local (Cosmopolitan Style: Modernism beyond the Nation[NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2006], 7).

28. Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism(NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1995), 2.

29. Ibid., 9.30. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land5.367, in The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism,

ed. Michael North (New York: Norton, 2001). All quotations of the original 1922 published

version of the poem are from this edition and are hereafter given parenthetically by sectionand line number.

31. Marshall, England and Nowhere, 103.



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Roessel, perhaps, comes closest to capturing the historical particularitieswithin whichThe Waste Landis embedded: That Eliot saw the disintegra-tion of empire as decay, rather than the growth of nationalism as progress,

is a key to his political thinking in the years in which the map of Europe wasbeing redrawn. However, Roessels argument focuses exclusively on Brit-ish newspaper reports on the disputed national identity of Smyrna (the dis-puted territory between Turkey and Greece) and the influential role ofSmyrna in Eliots portrayal of Mr. Eugenides as a symbol of the decay ofEurope.32 The political universe of the poem is shaped by this conflictbetween nationalism and empire, in which the latter is ostensibly alignedwith a tradition of Christian cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity. Thecoincidence of the degradations of city life in industrial London with post-

war European nationalism spells an annihilation of imperial subjectivities.One has to also contend with the changed nature of Eliots political aes-thetic of anti-Semitism in the context of his postwar antinationalist mod-ernism.The Waste Lands collision with postwar nationalism follows closelyupon the anti-Semitism in Eliots earlier poetry, in which an aesthetic cos-mopolitanism is predicated precisely upon the exclusion of Jews from thenational body politic. Vincent Sherry argues that Eliots modernist poetryof anti-Semitism before the war ought to be understood in the context ofthe poetic sensibility of the Anglo-Americans [that] exhibits all of the de-fensive aggressiveness of the arriviste.33 In his persuasive reading of Eliots

early modernism, Sherry points out that a decaying English liberalism pro-duces The Great War for English civilization (191). As a foreign national,Eliot can lay claim to the resources of an older English res (192) and gain

32. David Roessel, Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna Merchant, and Post-war Politics in TheWaste Land,Journal of ModernLiterature16 (1989): 171.

33. Vincent Sherry,The Great War and the Language of Modernism(New York: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 2003), 189. In a similar vein, Anthony Julius points out that Eliot adopted anti-Semitism to assimilate with European cultural and literary traditions: France showed Eliot that

a vigorous anti-Semitism could yet be thoroughly literary, and that it was compatible with cor-dial, salon relations with Jews. English anti-Semitism made available to Eliot a literary traditionin which the adverse characterization of Jews was consistent with work of the highest quality(T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form[Cambridge University Press, 1995], 16). In Burbankwith a Baedeker, Eliot with a Cigar: American Intellectuals, Anti-Semitism and the Idea of Cul-ture, Modernism/Modernity 10 (2003): 126, Ronald Schuchard presents a contrasting viewabout Eliots relations with anti-Semitism. Schuchard views anti-Semitic imagery in poems suchas Burbank with a Baedeker, Bleistein with a Cigar as primarily manifestations of the frag-mented mind of Europe, its deracinated Jewish characters far removed from their Sephardicorigins and adrift in a post-Versailles diaspora (8). Schuchard reads the portrayal of Jewishpersonages in Eliots poetry as evidence of Eliots awareness that the new foundations of post-

war Europe were being laid on the corpses of Jews (10). Schuchards essay is part of a widelypublicized, two-issue debate inModernism/Modernityon Eliots relations with anti-Semitism. SeeModernism/Modernity10, no. 1 ( January 2003) and 10, no. 3 (September 2003).



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poetic legitimacy (191) by disavowing an alien likeness between theJew and the American poet, which is achieved by revil[ing] the opportunis-tic ( Jewish) condition, even as he implements it as the enabling situation of

his verse (192). It is imperative to note that the force and impact of liberalnationalism upon Europe after the war considerably diminishes Eliotsinvestment in anti-Semitism and its role in the innovations of his modern-ist project (189). In other words, postwar nationalism takes the place ofJews as the thing that has eroded cultural and imperial authority. Eliots hos-tility toward nationalism shapes the antiterritorial poetics ofThe Waste Landand serves as a new receptacle for anxieties about cultural degradation inEurope and England.34

In Dante (1929), Eliot refers to the Treaty of Versailles as the origin of

the process of disintegration for the twentieth century.

35

Eliots criticismof the peace treaty takes its inspiration from John Maynard Keyness TheEconomic Consequences of the Peace(1920), which clearly foresaw the disas-trous consequences of the punitive measures the treaty imposed on Ger-many. Keynes had famously labeled the treaty as a Carthaginian peaceforced on continental Europe by Britain and her allies.36 Eliots similardenunciation of the peace treaty stemmed from his work as an employee

34. Christopher Ricks draws our attention to religious and intellectual distinctionsbetween Eliots anti-Semitic poetry leading up to The Waste Landand his attack upon free-

thinking Jews inAfter Strange Gods(T. S. Eliot and Prejudice[Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1988], 2554). According to Paul Morrison, Eliots Anglo-Catholic religious commit-ment prevents an aesthetic commitment to a poetics of fascism, unlike the poetry of EzraPound: Pound is committed to the construction of the fascist city of man; Eliot awaits thecoming city of God (The Poetics of Fascism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul de Man[New York:Oxford University Press, 1996], 37). Maud Ellmann proposes a connection between Eliotsearlier modernist poetry and later works such as After Strange Godsand, contra Schuchard,views Eliots writings on deracinated or free-thinking Jews as expressing a specific anti-Semitic fear or paranoia: The fear of deracination or displacement is the wellspring of muchof the anti-Semitism to be found in Eliot and Pound (The Imaginary Jew: T. S. Eliot and EzraPound, inBetween Race and Culture:Representations of the Jew in English and American Litera-

ture, ed. Bryan Cheyette [Stanford University Press, 1996], 89). Although I agree with Ellmannand others that Eliots later works occasionally suggest a continued anti-Semitic sentiment,Eliots literary anti-Semitism changes when he links the ideology of nationalism with the cul-tural degeneracy in Europe that was formerly attributed to Jews. The deletion of anti-Semiticpassages in The Waste Land, under the direction of Ezra Pound, is also evidence of Eliots chang-ing relationship with anti-Semitism. As Ellmann points out, Eliots early poems would neverhave survived suchcuts (85).

35. T. S. Eliot, Dante (1929), in Selected Essays, 19171932(New York: Harcourt Brace,1932), 202.

36. Eleanor Cook explains that Eliot probably saw London as another Carthage. Thebloody fate of Carthage in the second and third Punic Wars gave rise to the phrase Carthagin-

ian Peace, which meant a peace settlement so punitive as to destroy the enemy entirely andeven to make sterile the land on which he lives (T. S. Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace, inT. S. Eliots The Waste Land, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House,1986), 88.



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in Lloyds Bank on the settlement of German debts. In a 1920 letter to hismother, Eliot talks about Vienna and Germany in despairing tones andrecommends Keyness book: I wonder if America realizes how terrible the

condition of Central Europe is. I can never quite put Vienna out of mymind. They say there is no hope unless the treaty is revised. I believe by theway that J. M. Keynes:Economic Consequences of the Peaceis an important book,if you can get hold of it.37 A few months earlier, Eliot had written to hismother about Wilsons utter helplessness before the French presidentsunflinching advocacy of the peace plan: Wilson went down utterly beforeEuropean diplomacy. It is obviously a bad peace, in which the major Euro-pean powers tried to get as much as they could, and appease or ingratiate asfar as possible the various puppet nationalities which they have constituted

and will try to dominate.

38

Eliots letter reflects a common contemporaryview according to which Wilsons well-meaning liberal policy of nationalself-determination was ultimately unsuited to and ignorant of the politicalrealities of Europe.39Although Eliots animus toward the peace treaty is ex-plicitly documented in his letters and essays, less well known is the extent towhich its principles influenced his portrayal of Europe in The Waste Land.The literary innovations ofThe Waste Landregister the territorial and lin-guistic crises that follow the peace treaty, through implicit and explicit signi-fication of the whole lost order of European empires.

The treatys enforcement of the principle of liberal nationalism primarily

brought about the establishment of weak nation-states in Central and East-ern Europe, following the collapse of the Habsburg, Romanov, Hohenzol-lern, and Ottoman empires. The disintegration of these empires, particu-larly the breakup of the colossal Habsburg, or Austrian, dynasty/monarchy,ended the legitimacy of Legitimacy, and put paid to the dream of a UnitedStates of Greater Austria.40 Rob Nixon calls the period from 1917 to 1921the high era of European national birthing.41 Territories were ceded andseized, and nations were made and unmade, as nationalists of variousstripes cobbled together hastily formed governments across Central and

37. T. S. Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, January 6, 1920, in Eliot, Letters,vol. 1, 18981922.38. T. S. Eliot to Charlotte Eliot, October 2, 1919, ibid.39. Eliots criticism of key participants in the peace conference closely resembles Keyness

analysis that pitted Wilsons well-meaningliberal policy of self-determination against the politi-cal maneuvering of Clemenceau and Lloyd George, who were almost exclusively interested ina Carthaginian peace for Germany that went beyond the Peace of magnanimity pre-scribed by the fourteen points of President Wilson ( John Maynard Keynes,The EconomicConsequences of the Peace[New York: Harcourt, Brace & Howe, 1920], 111).

40. Anderson, introduction to Mapping the Nation, 7.41. Rob Nixon, Of Balkans and Bantustans: Ethnic Cleansing and the Crisis in National

Legitimation, in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives, ed. AnneMcClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1997), 246.



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Eastern Europe.The Waste Landis populated with those troubled sites inEurope whose material and cultural spaces can no longer be mapped interms of a prewar cartography. The poem moves from references to Ger-

many, Russia, Lithuania, Switzerland, and Smyrna to the past and recentempires of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, and Vienna. London is repre-sented through this critique of territorial nationalism; its spatial and tem-poral fixity is dismantled as fragmented inscriptions of classical Europeanpasts float across its surface. In his famous essay DissemiNation, HomiBhabha points out that a national feeling of oneness or citizenship withinthe political society of a modern nation is fostered by the incessant mime-ticism of the realist narrative in the novel that reflects the everyday life ofthe nation.42 The thoroughly absurdist universe of the poem is replete with

spaces and landmarks of urban existence that have been wrenched from arepresentational matrix of chronology and local and national community.In one of the poems most vivid instances, the portrayal of London Bridgeas a daily thoroughfare for crowds undone by death, and as the site of aconversation about a planted corpse expected to bloom and sprout,amounts, as Franco Moretti brilliantly suggests, to a radical devaluationof the realist conventions of an emplotment of the nation and its commu-nity.43 The surreal transformation of the commonplaces of communityand nation, such as a mundane conversation or the daily journey to work(A crowd flowed over London Bridge [1.62]), collectively mark a setting

in which the alienated consciousness resists homogeneity and insularity.The opening sequence ofThe Waste Landinvites a political reading, as it

challenges the treatys principles for designating nationality, which hadcreated new and untenable political identities:

we stopped in the colonnadeAnd went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.Bin gar keine Russin, stamm aus Litauen, echt deutsch(Im not a Russian woman at all; I come from Lithuania, a true German).

(1.1014)

This section highlights a paradoxical fluid modernist subjectivity, caused bya rapidly dissolved national affiliation in the wake of the Russian empirescollapse, as well as an inflexible new national ethnic identity (true Ger-man). Arendt characterizes the new era that was shaped by the peacetreaty as the century which naively assumed that all peoples were

42. Homi K. Bhabha, DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern

Nation, in Nation and Narration, ed. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 294.43. Franco Moretti, From The Waste Landto the Artificial Paradise, in Signs Taken for Won-

ders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms(New York: Verso, 1983), 222.



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nations.44 The speakers self-identification underscores the nationalist orethnic affiliations that arise in the aftermath of the disintegration of theRussian empire, as well as the relations between a professed ethnic identity

and the physical borders of the state (whether Lithuania or Russia). TheWaste Land, which was planned and written between 1919 and 1921, isdirectly concerned with and indeed influenced by changing national fron-tiers across Europe.

The poems imagination of identities radically other to the claims ofnationalism captures the shifting boundaries between self and foreigner.Toward the end of section 1 (The Burial of the Dead), the speaker ob-serves the crowd undone by death flowing over London Bridge and is sur-prised to recognize someone from his past: There I saw one I knew, and

stopped him crying: Stetson! / You who were with me in the ships atMylae! (1.6970) As Eliots note tells us, the speakers recognizes Stetsonas a compatriot in a battle in the first Punic War between Rome and Carth-age. The other level of discourse in this scene of recognition is, of course,the blurring of boundaries between the self and the other. Hence, at the veryend of the same stanza the speaker ends the drama of his meeting with Stet-son with a line from the introductory poem of BaudelairesLes fleurs du mal(1857): You! hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frere! (1.76).This relationship between self and other, flitting between self-alienationand identification, expresses a conception of affinity or community that

flouts conventions of nationalism.In the post-1918 world, Eliot confronts the emergence of the nation-state

as the new signifier of universality, which ends the Edwardian dream of impe-rial consolidation in Europe. If the decline of the British empire is an integralpart of Eliots early modernism, as Sherry argues, then the complex inter-play between nationalism and the cultural poetics of empire can be under-stood as a significant aspect of Eliots modernism.45 Eliots poetry harmo-nizes the contemporary and the historical scales of the British empire andthe Roman empire through a reading of the devastating effects of postwar

liberal nationalism upon empire altogether. The disintegration of empireand imperial civilization in the poem is poised between spectral echoes ofan imperial Roman past and the degradation and emptiness that dominatecontemporary London, which is haunted by remnants of English imperial-ism. At least since Eleanor Cooks identification of the Roman empire as aprototype in the poem,The Waste Lands elegiac preoccupation with the

44. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 567.

45. Vincent Sherry, T. S. Eliot, Late Empire, and Decadence, in Modernism and Colonial-ism: British and Irish Literature, 18991939, ed. Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses (Dur-ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 11135.



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dissolution of empire in Europe has received significant critical attention.46

The juxtaposition of Dantes purgatory or second kingdom with the fallenimperial capitals of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria, Vienna, and London also

suggests an opposition between the strictly physical scope of nationalismand an eternal realm that defies territorial borders and that Eliot projectsthrough the voices of Augustine and Dante. The falling towers of Vienna,erstwhile capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire, signify the end of a pro-jected Roman paradigm of imperial universality: the ideal of limitless linguis-tic cultural heterogeneity without national frontiers.

The Waste Landexpresses a sense of affiliation with AugustinesThe City ofGodthat testifies to Eliots zeal to confront the seemingly unalterable realityof nationalism. Written during the Roman empires years of unstoppable

decline,The City of Godtries to comprehend the afflictions that beset theempire, ranging from the loss of lands to invaders to the moral corruptionof its rulers and citizens. Cook brilliantly highlights the correspondencebetween Rome and The Waste Lands postwar British who enforce a Cartha-ginian peace on their defeated enemy that also has a terrible impact on thevictor. Rather early in his work, Augustine writes of the fragility of the Romanempire, as its victory in war foreshadows its ruin: I should like first to inquirefor a little what reason, what prudence, there is in wishing to glory in thegreatness and extent of the empire, when you cannot point out the happi-ness of men who are always rolling, with dark fear and cruel lust, in warlike

slaughters and in blood, which, whether shed in civil or foreign war, is stillhuman blood; so that their joy may be compared to glass in its fragile splen-dor, of which one is horribly afraid lest it should be suddenly broken inpieces.47Augustinian echoes inThe Waste Landsuggest that the glories ofempire are outweighed by an Augustinian vision of anti-imperial pacifism. Itwould be rather nave to conclude thatThe Waste Landovercomes national-ism exclusively through the idealization of a vast Roman empire and itshybrid linguistic and religious traditions.

Eliot was more intent upon capturing the paradigm of Augustines free

city of God, infinite in time and space, as a counterpoint to the lustful,fleshly, and sordidly industrial city of London as well as postwar Europeannation-states. Augustine derives his vision of citizenship in the city of Godfrom Latin influences that included Ciceros political ideals for a Romanrepublic that had unfortunately remained unrealized in practice: ForCicero briefly defines a republic as the weal of the people. And if this defi-

46. According to Cook,The Waste Landis both a London poem and a European poemwhose place-names recall the Roman empire at its most expansive. Urban vision, imperialvision, world vision: each illuminates the other (Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace, 82).

47. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dodds (New York: Random House, 1950), 4.3.Unless otherwise noted, all quotations fromThe City of Godare from Doddss translation andare hereafter cited parenthetically by book and chapter number.



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nition be true, there never was a Roman republic, for the peoples weal wasnever attained among the Romans. For Augustine, Ciceros De republicagrounded citizenship in the community of interests fostered by a com-

mon acknowledgment of true justice, which would turn a promiscuousmultitude into a people (19.21).48 This definition of citizenship could beadapted by Augustine to understand fellowship in the city of God beyondthe citizenship conferred by shared territorial identity. Augustine minglesthe secular postulates of Republican citizenship with biblical testimonyon the spiritual experience of citizenship in the city of God.49 He citesscriptural texts that testify to the existence of the heavenly city: Inanother psalm [86:3] we read, Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praisedin the city of our God, in the mountain of His holiness, increasing the joy

of the whole earth.. . .

From these and similar testimonies, we havelearned that there is a city of God, and its Founder has inspired us with alove which makes us covet its citizenship (11.1).

In What the Thunder Said, the godly city in the mountain is juxta-posed to a postwar Europe enveloped in chaos, nationalisms curse of exile,homelessness, and imperial disintegration, all mingling with Augustinesown categories of citizen and alien in the city of God: Who are thosehooded hordes swarming / . . . What is the city over the mountains / Cracksand reforms and bursts in the violet air / Falling towers (5.36770). Eliotis drawn toThe City of Godnot simply because it presented an ethic of citi-

zenship that helped him to expose the fragility of national identity. Augus-tines work, in its rapt portrayal of the distinctions between the city of spiritand the city of material lusts, figures forth a connection between heavenlycitizenship and earthly exile that becomes the basis for human allegianceto the city of God. As we shall see, Eliot adapts this very correspondencebetween alienation upon earth and community in the city of God to repre-sent both the dark repercussions of postwar nationalism in the UnrealCity (1.60) and what might constitute citizenship in the transcendent city.

It is important to take note of the account that Augustine provides of

the relationship between thecivitas Deiandcivitas Romaein order better tounderstandThe Waste Lands preoccupation with Augustines work. In thefirst version ofThe Waste Land, an imagined identity that transcends thelimitations of territorial boundaries is captured in a line from Platos Repub-lic: Glaucon / Not here, O Ademantus, but in another world.50 In the

48. Henry Bettenson and Gillian Rosemary Evans (introduction to Augustine, Concerningthe City of God against the Pagans, trans. Henry Scowcroft Bettenson [New York: Penguin, 2003])point out that Augustine adapts a Ciceronian definition of a commonwealth to make it fit aChristian context (xlv).

49. Ibid., xliv.50. T. S. Eliot,The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the

Annotations of Ezra Pound, ed. Valerie Eliot (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 31.



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same book of the Republic, Socratess response to Glaucons statementabout the fictitious nature of the described city affirms the existence ofanother realm of citizenship: Well, said I [Socrates], perhaps there is a

pattern of it [the city] laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplateit and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen.51 Cook writes that thisPlatonic ideal, which also inspired Augustines vision of the civitas Dei,could not be sustained in the final version ofThe Waste Land: Eliot finallycut all references to an ideal city, because, I think, the developing theme ofurban and imperial apocalypse refused to accommodate so firm a hope.52

Cooks assertion, unfortunately, underplays Eliots continuing use, in the1922Waste Land, of Augustines portrait of the civitas Deito illuminate thephenomenal historical changes in postwar Europe. Given The Waste Lands

adaptation of the Manichean conflict between body and soul that occursin AugustinesConfessions(To Carthage then I came / Burning burningburning burning / O Lord Thou pluckest me out [3.3079]), one mightbe tempted to entertain the notion that the poem explores a similar oppo-sition, between sinful and ideal cities, gleaned from The City of God. Afterall, in The City of God Augustine himself explicitly describes the contrastbetween the two cities as echoing the diametric relationship between fleshand spirit set forth inConfessions: Though there are very many and greatnations . . . , yet there are no more than two kinds of human society, whichwe may justly call two cities. The one consists of those who wish to live after

the flesh, the other of those who wish to live after the spirit (14.1). Augus-tines examples of lustful human societies are Rome and Babylon, whichhe contrasts with the true Jerusalem eternal in the heavens, whose chil-dren are all those that live according to God in this earth (17.3).

However, despite the Manichean resonances, The City of Godis inter-ested, above all, in emphasizing the simultaneous existence of the ideal cityand its opposite upon earth. In fact, as Augustine points out, the coexis-tence of the two cities means that human beings can be citizens of thegodly city while it is on a pilgrimage on earth. It is this very notion of the

presence of the city of God in the world53

that Eliot enshrines in his poemand that allows him to reformulate nationalisms determinations of citizenand alien in terms of the requirements of mortal citizenship in Gods city.Thus, the suppression of a Platonic reference to a heavenly city in the 1922Waste Landdoes not betoken an attempt to replace the notion of an idealcity with the specter of imperial apocalypse in the unreal city. Rather, theomission serves to emphasize the physical proximity of the civitas Deito theearthly city as imagined by Augustine, further underscoring the geographi-

51. Plato, Republic9.592, quoted ibid., 128.52. Cook, Eliot and the Carthaginian Peace, 92.53. See Bettenson and Evans, introduction to Concerning the City of God, xlviii.



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cal infinitude of the city of God, which represents a challenge to national-isms territorial imperatives.

Of the correspondence between the two cities, Augustine writes, the

heavenly and earthly, which are mingled together from the beginningdown to the end. While the earthly city worships false gods, she whichis heavenly, and is a pilgrim on the earth . . .is herself made by the trueGod, of whom she herself must be the true sacrifice. The citizens of bothcities lead similar mortal lives amidst good and evil, until separated by thelast judgment (18.54). The parallel courses of the two cities signify thatGods city lives in this worlds city, as far as its human element is con-cerned; but it lives there as an alien sojourner.54 The Waste Landattemptsto capture this Augustinian sense of the ordinary mortal who forsakes citi-

zenship in the earthly city, becomes a stranger and pilgrim in it, and isrendered a member of a heavenly society. The famous last stanza of Eliotspoem powerfully and eloquently captures the alien voices that try to trans-cend the coercive identities of a postwar world:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling downPoi sascose nel foco che gli affinaQuando fiam uti chelidonO swallow swallowLe Prince dAquitaine a`la tour abolieThese fragments I have shored against my ruinsWhy then Ile fit you. Hieronymos mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.Shantih shantih shantih

(5.42633)

The collection of foreign tongues dramatizes the alternative to unrealnationalist identities. Augustine further makes the point that While thisHeavenly City . . . is on pilgrimage in this world, she calls out citizens of allnations and so collects a society of all aliens, speaking all languages. . . .Thuseven the Heavenly City in her pilgrimage here on earth makes use of the

earthly peace and defends and seeks the compromise between humanwills. . . .In fact, that city relates the earthly peace to the heavenly peace,which is so truly peaceful that it should be regarded as the only peace deserv-

ing the name.55 It appears then thatThe Waste Lands evocation of multiplelanguages and universal peace in a crisis-ridden Europe (Shantih, shantih,shantih) echoes Augustines attempts to project a different ethic of citizen-ship that would rise above national or territorial bonds to create a peace thathad eluded a dissolute, violent, and corrupt Rome. It is not surprising thatthe association Augustine makes between earthly exile and heavenly mem-

54. Bettenson, Concerning the City of God, 18.1 (p. 609).55. Ibid., 19.17 (p. 878).



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bership would be attractive to an immigrant poet intent upon expressinga modernist sense of identity within the fragmented spaces created bypostwar nationalism. Eliots post-Augustinian expression of a universality

achieved through the shoring of fragments of alien languages defies a uni-tary tradition of language, culture, and national and political allegiance ofthe sort advocated by the Treaty of Versailles.

The unedited version ofThe Waste Landmakes it apparent that the heav-enly city derives its conceptual significance from the unreal city of Lon-don.56 In the first draft, Socratess response to Glaucon occurs in the samesection as the description of the unreal city. Also in this version, the unreal,earthly city of London is described at some length to emphasize the postwarindustrial degradation of the city and the lives of its inhabitants: London,

the swarming life you kill and breed, /. . . London, your people is boundupon the wheel! / Phantasmal gnomes, burrowing in brick and stone andsteel!57 Ultimately, the contrary states of a dehumanized industrial Lon-don and the beatific world imagined by Socrates give way, in the 1922 publi-cation, to a Dantean vision of the living death of industrial masses: UnrealCity / Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, /A crowd flowed over LondonBridge, so many, / I had not thought death had undone so many (1.6063). Nonetheless, both versions contain the critical realization that the mostviable form of national identity for early twentieth-century England derivedfrom the shaping influence of industrialization and the concomitant pro-

duction of mass cultural and political uniformity. In his classic workNationsand Nationalism, Ernest Gellner argues that if nationalism means homoge-neity or a condition in which culture and polity are congruent then it isthe age of industrialism that produces nationalism by assigning fixed rolesto people, which extends to a formation of citizens distinct political identityin relation to the nation. Gellner describes the latter phenomenon as a ho-

56. Denis Donoghue stresses the equation between the city of God and the unreal city inthe poem: A Tiresias would see the City of God as clearly as the unreal city, its malign counter-

part. So the poem moves betweenHeart of Darknessand heart of light (The Word within aWord, in North, Waste Land: Authoritative Text, 223).

57. Eliot, Waste Land: A Facsimile, 31. Pounds deletions in this section (The Fire Sermon)remove much of the explanatory content that captures a contrast between industrial Londonand a transcendent world, and in so doing contribute to the poems discontinuities and helpto sharpen the theme of a world of mingled fragments in which the presences of heaven andearth, living and dead, are left indistinguishable. Although Eliots contradictory commitmentsto religion and empire as alternatives to nationalism are unique to his poetic and intellectualsensibility, Pounds editing undoubtedly heightenedThe Waste Lands universalist heteroge-neous tendencies, facilitating a critique of the peace treatys vision of a new Europe. In hisstudy of Pounds influence upon the shape of the mythic material in The Waste Land, Leon

Surette focuses on Pounds impact upon the thematic coherence of the poem and not on itsrhetorical structure (The Birth of Modernism: Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, and the Occult[Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1993], 239).



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mogeneity imposed by objective, inescapable imperative [that] eventuallyappears on the surface in the form of nationalism.58 Industrial Londonsimperatives toward homogeneity are implied byThe Waste Lands verbal

and atmospheric landscape, as seen in the lines above. The poem brings to-gether a spiritually vacant metropolitan industrialism and collapsing Euro-pean empires to suggest new forms of postimperial and postsecular nationalidentities.

InThe Waste Land, Eliots pessimistic vision of postwar and postimperialnationalism draws on Dantes construction of hell and purgatory to dis-mantle the rigid political status of European subjects that is imposed by thepeace treatys new conditions. Dantes imagination of a global communitywas manifestly different from that of Augustine, and their opposing con-

ceptualization of community contributes to the poems unique densityand complexity. As we shall see, Eliots recognition of the cultural and lin-guistic diversity in Dantes poetry diverges from his perception of the com-munity of alien tongues that characterizes Augustines godly city. The for-mer belongs to the privileged system of the Roman empire, and, thus,Dantes evocation of universality in Purgatorio has a different characterfrom Augustines evocation of the same. If London is the malign counter-part of the city of God, it is also a transnational Dantean megapolisthatstands in for Europe. Julia Kristeva points out that the megapoliswas anideal of the Roman empire, implying a universalism that encompassed

the entire universe from citizen to the stars, including Greeks and barbar-ians as well, slaves and free men.59 So, how should a reader interpret thesetwo contrasting possibilities of antinationalist communities in the poem?Critics have not always been sensitive to the poems conflicting allusions toAugustine and Dante. According to Jean-Michel Rabate, Eliots allusions toDante, Virgil, and Augustine point to a comprehensive notion ofcivitasthat prioritizes people or citizens over the state or city: In the Latin mind,the adjectivecivisis anterior to the concept ofcivitas, which means a cityas a group of people. However, a kinship between a modernist polyphony

of all the citizens voices60

in the poems finale and the Latinized civitasexists alongside its disruptive counterpart, a dissolution of the civic worldwithin a mythologized London. The latter is represented in terms of anew strangeness overtly acknowledged by the poem in its reference to anUnreal City. The plight of the souls in DantesPurgatoriois reflected inthe dispossession and displacement of the hooded hordes of disintegrat-ing Eastern European empires. The Waste Landrepresents citizenship as

58. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 4.59. Julia Kristeva,Nations without Nationalism, trans. Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia

University Press, 1993), 21.60. Jean-Michel Rabate, Tradition and T. S. Eliot, in Moody, Cambridge Companion to T. S.

Eliot, 214 15.



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deterritorialized and denationalized, an inversion of the universal imperialideal of Virgilian Rome: Who are these hooded hordes swarming / Overendless plains, stumbling in cracked earth (5.36768). The poems repre-

sentation of the undone souls of Ugolino, Arnaut Daniel, and La Pia,which reside in deaths other kingdom, not only signifies modern alie-nated identities that are immune to nationalist interpellation but also ren-ders London unreal, transforming its spaces into surreal echoes of a shat-tered European tradition and, thus, effacing the material territory that is aprimary concern of nationalism.

The Waste Lands lament over the sacrifice of a transnational Europeantradition on the altar of nationalism once again finds expression in Eliotsessay on Dante. Eliot writes of the accessibility of Dante to the foreigner

of his own time because of a shared European tradition: Dante is easierto read for a foreigner who does not know Italian very well, for other rea-sons: but all related to this central reason, that in Dantes time Europe, withall its dissensions and dirtiness, was mentally more united than we can nowconceive. It is not particularly the Treaty of Versailles that has separatednation from nation; nationalism was born long before; and the process ofdisintegration which for our generation culminates in that treaty begansoon after Dantes time.61When the poetic I says of the fractured Euro-pean tongues, These fragments I have shored against my ruins, he ismotioning toward a European past whose text of a unified consciousness

would have been legible to a foreigner but presently exists as a collage ofdisconnected textual pieces.

For Eliot, Dantes Roman cosmopolitan paradigm was naturally evoca-tive of empire, not only because his poetry transcended linguistic and terri-torial borders but also because it engendered meetings or reunionsbetween poets living and dead, chief among them the long shared journeyof the narrator and protagonist Dante and Virgil, the creator of an ideal ofimperial Rome. In his essay What Is a Classic? Eliot takes Virgil, whoseAeneidportrays the destiny of the Roman empire, to represent the epitome

of classicism for Europe. Virgil is also Dantes guide in Purgatorio; for Eliotthis relationship culminates when Virgil bestows upon Dante the vision ofChristian culture in Europe at the end of his pilgrimage: Son, the tempo-ral fire and the eternal, hast thou seen, and art come to a place where I, ofmyself, discern no further.62 Dantes parting lines to Virgil, translated byEliot and cited in his essay, give us a hint of the poetic voice that Eliot wasdeveloping in The Waste Land: a voice constituted by a transcendent literarytradition and committed to evoking a transnational imperial imaginary ofEurope. Dantes reunions with once living poets, through much ofPur-

61. Eliot, Dante, 202.62. T. S. Eliot, What Is a Classic? in On Poetry and Poets, 71.



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gatorio, provide a remarkable basis for Eliots own emigre-pilgrim voice thatis shaped by forging connections with dead European poets who are closelyassociated with the cultural imaginary of empire. Dantes gift of a double

vision of the temporal and the eternal is also owned by the speaker inThe Waste Land. However, the latter testifies to the disintegration of thisideal of a universal imperial Christian culture in Europe. The Christian-imperial cosmopolitanism expressed by Virgils vision of the temporal andthe transcendent is not the legacy of the speaker in Eliots poem, whoadmits, I can connect / Nothing with nothing (3.3012). Something ofthe same evaluation motivates The Waste Lands reference, in its last sec-tion, to the non-Italian poet Arnaut Daniel, who speaks with Dante and Vir-gil in his native Provencal tongue in canto 26 ofPurgatorio: Poi sascose

nel foco che gli affina (5.427). Eliot was attracted to the cultural diversityentailed in a meeting between poets of different linguistic traditions, andhe returned again to this scene of reunion in his essay Dante.

The political value of this aesthetic becomes clearer in Four Quartets,where Eliot uses the theological framework of Dantean universalism torepresent England in terms of a universal design outside time.63 How-ever, in The Waste Land, the fragments from Dantes texts should not beconfused with a totalizing transcendent imagined community. Rather, theyrepresent disembodied presences that intensify the poems defamiliarizedlandscape of alienation, thus contradicting a nationalist impetus toward po-

litical or cultural or ethnic community. As we have seen, Eliots prose andpoetry repeatedly point to a correspondence between Dantes poetry andantinationalism. The tensions between a representation of the transcend-ent value of Roman classicism, as a critique of liberal nationalism, and a si-multaneous portrayal of its vulnerability and destruction, in the context ofpostwar nationalism, point us toward the most interesting paradox ofTheWaste Land. The modernist Eliot who had learned his philosophical lessonsfrom the neo-Hegelianism of F. H. Bradley was not content merely to showhow a mythical and classical European tradition threw light upon the con-

temporary. In other words, the poems portrayal of an extreme fragmenta-tion of the classical mind of Europe also gives space to the very possibilityof an enduring European tradition that the larger structure and movementof the poem attempts to counter.64

63. Paul Stevens, England in Moghul India, in Imperialisms: Historical and Literary Investiga-tions, 15001900, ed. Balachandra Rajanand Elizabeth Sauer (New York: Macmillan, 2004), 67.

64. In a similar account ofThe Waste Land, Michael North observes, It is as if Eliot couldonly approach peace through conflict, as if he could only grasp linguistic unity as an implica-

tion of linguistic disorder, and, finally, as if he could imagine social solidarity only by extensionof social chaos. Disorder thus becomes not a fault to be overcome, but a necessary moment inthe process of arriving at order (Political Aesthetic, 104).



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Like the poems use of myth and classical allusions, the presence of theself-conscious voice of the emigre poet challenges the sense of unitary iden-tities fostered by nationalism. In a penetrating analysis, Rabate refers to

Eliot as ameticwith a status distinct from that of the citizens whose voices heattempts to record at the end of The Waste Land. No wonder that themetic has not turned into a mimetic capable of imitating all the citizensvoices!65 Rabates employment of the term metic is highly appropriateinsofar as it focuses on the city as a locus of the metics being and signifi-cance.66 However, the distinction between meticand citizens that Rabatesees as applicable to The Waste Landas a whole is in fact undermined by thepoem, as we have seen in the context of Eliots use ofThe City of God.

The concept ofpolis, if we apply it to the sociocultural space denoted by

the poem, leaves a trail of confusing options. Does the poems polyphonyimbue the polis with an acknowledgment of differences made up of a collec-tivity ofmeticsjust like the poet? Or does the poem, precisely in recordingfragmented voices across eras and cultures, aspire toward a transnationaluniversalism like that of Augustines heavenly city? Although the poem pre-vents any central definition of universalism as symbolic of the Romanempire, its universalismas signaled by the crowding of truncated Euro-pean subjectivities67 from past and present in the city of Londonis botha reminder and a distortion of the classical ideal of a universal empire.Eliots position as a self-consciousmeticacquires a particular significance in

light of the last stanza of the poem. The voices in the poems finale belongto those who, despite their European heritage, are also meticsunable toread each other, rendered foreign by the political alienation of Europeannations from one another. The disunified consciousness is that of Eu-rope, and the poet is onemeticamong countless others. In the chaotic pres-ent of Europe, universalism and otherness cannot be separated, an echo ofAugustines vision of citizenship in the city of God during the disintegrationof the Roman empire. The poem thus approaches a state of universalotherness68 in which citizen, foreigner, and meticare difficult to distin-

guish from one another.

65. Rabate, Tradition and T. S. Eliot, 214.66. Ibid., 213.67. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness, 192.68. I take this term from Julia Kristeva, who writes about a universalism produced by a

Freudian discovery of our intrinsic difference: Let us know ourselves as unconscious,altered, other in order to better approach the universal otherness of the strangers that we are(Nations without Nationalism, 21).


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