4 / Amalgamating Disparate Experience Myth and Gender in

"A Game of Chess"

When a poet's mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience;
the ordinary man's experience is chaotic, irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza,
and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the
smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.-- Eliot, "The
Metaphysical Poets" ( 1921)

Eliot's understanding of poetic epistemology is a version of Bradley's theory, outlined in our second
chapter, that knowing involves immediate, relational, and transcendent stages or levels. The poetic mind,
like the ordinary mind, has at least two types of experience: The first consists largely of feeling (falling in
love, smelling the cooking, hearing the noise of the typewriter), the second largely of thought (reading
Spinoza). The first type of experience is sensuous, and it is also to a great extent monistic or immediate, for
it does not require mediation through the mind; it exists before intellectual analysis, before the falling apart
of experience into experiencer and experienced. The second type of experience, in contrast, is intellectual
(to be known at all, it must be mediated through the mind) and sharply dualistic, in that it involves a
breaking down of experience into subject and object. In the mind of the ordinary person, these two types of
experience are and remain disparate. In the mind of the poet, these disparate experiences are somehow
transcended and amalgamated into a new whole, a whole beyond and yet including subject and object,
mind and matter. Eliot illustrates his explanation of poetic epistemology by saying that John Donne did not
simply feel his feelings and think his thoughts; he felt his thoughts and thought his feelings. He was able to
"feel his thought as immediately as the odour of a rose."1 Immediately" in this famous simile is a technical
term in philosophy, used with precision; it means unmediated through mind, unshattered into subject and
object.

Falling in love and reading Spinoza typify Eliot's own experiences in the years in which he was writing The
Waste Land. These were the exciting and exhausting years in which he met Vivien Haigh-Wood and
consummated a disastrous marriage, the years in which he was deeply involved in reading F. H. Bradley,
the years in which he was torn between the professions of philosophy and poetry and in which he was in
close and frequent contact with such brilliant and stimulating figures as Bertrand Russell and Ezra Pound,
the years of the break from his family and homeland, the years in which in every area of his life he seemed
to be between broken worlds. The experiences of these years constitute the material of The Waste Land. The
relevant biographical details need not be reviewed here, for they are presented in the introduction to The
Waste Land Facsimile. For our purposes, it is only necessary to acknowledge what Eliot himself
acknowledged: the material of art is always actual life.2 At the same time, it should also be noted that
material in itself is not art. As Eliot argued in his review of Ulysses, "in creation you are responsible for what
you can do with material which you must simply accept."3 For Eliot, the given material included relations
with and observations of women, in particular, of his bright but seemingly incurably ill wife Vivien(ne).
In the second part of The Waste Land, we have an example of how one poet transformed his material into art.
The focus in "A Game of Chess" is primarily on women. Taking doomed female characters from art, history,
myth, and contemporary life, Eliot creates a cubistic woman, a multiperspectival portrait of women in
waste lands, of wasted women in history and nature. He structures this part of the poem by using the frame
and picture arrangement illustrated in "The Burial of the Dead." As in an elaborately framed photograph of a
mundane scene, the frame here is decorative, taken from the world of high art, and the picture is
photographic, focused on the everyday world of failed marriages. Certain details are recognizable from
Eliot's first marriage, but the picture here is a fiction, an aesthetic construction by a highly conscious artist.

The frame in "A Game of Chess" features two Shakespearean women, and the picture, a diptych, features two
contemporary women. In the first lines, Eliot evokes the splendid but wily Cleopatra on her barge in the
river Nile, and in the last lines, he first echoes and then quotes the simple but mad Ophelia on her way to
death by water. Within the frame of these two tragic figures, he suggests through allusion the presence of
many offstage women, such as Dido, Eve, and Queen Gertrude. Like Philomela, who is mentioned in the
first part of this section, most of these women have been violated or betrayed or exploited by men; most
have suffered irreversible ruin.

The original title of this section was "In the Cage," an image which Valerie Eliot suggests in her notes to The
Waste Land Facsimile refers to the Sibyl in the poems epigraph.4 The word "cage" was used in some Victorian
translations of the Satyricon, although "bottle" is a more accurate translation.5 But whether cage or bottle,
the women in this part of The Waste Land are all entrapped; like the Sibyl, they are isolated and withered in
their ability to know, to be, and to bear. Like her, these women are enclosed and dangled as decorations or
amusements for men. The contemporary women in "A Game of Chess" brush their hair, complain of nervous
ennui, drink and gossip in a tavern, and perform other mundane acts; they are more vividly present than
their counterparts in myth and art. This section of The Waste Land, interestingly, is the only one that takes
place exclusively on the inside of rooms; the other sections are set primarily in nature. The first half is set in
a boudoir, the second in a pub.

"A Game of Chess" continues and develops Eliot's exploration of different ways of "knowing," in particular,
of what could be called "female epistemology" and of the necessity that it be complemented by "male
epistemology" and, further, of the necessity that both be transcended. The wasting of human beings of both
sexes can be seen as one of the consequences of separating female and male modes of knowing/being, that
is, of separating perception from reason, experience from faith. These matters are a variant of the idea that
isolation and consequent barrenness result from perceiving reality in terms of subjects, objects, and
relations; unity and consequent fruitfulness result from going beyond relations, from transcendent
knowing. It should not be thought that Eliot's attention to women is restricted to "A Game of Chess." The
title, as we shall point out, is feminine, the epigraph deals with a female knower (the Sibyl), the first lines
focus on Marie, and the first section has Madame Sosostris and her tarot cards at its center. This focus on
women, as we shall see, is also a major element in "The Fire Sermon."

Eliot's focus on women cannot be understood apart from some attention to myth. In the myths that form
the background of The Waste Land, those taken from Frazer and Weston, the land is the feminine
counterpart of a king or lord. The importance of women in the poem becomes strikingly clear when it is
realized that a waste land is in mythic terms equivalent to a barren or unhealthy woman. Although some
myths show the impotence of kings and gods to be caused by a failure of the feminine earth, most myths,
and certainly the ones Eliot refers to centrally, put it in the opposite way. The king falls first into incapacity
or guilt, and his land follows him into barrenness and disease. He is responsible for the catastrophe that
befalls both himself and his land, and he suffers both physical pain and the anguish of separation from his
land. The maternal figures (the land and all of its female occupants) suffer, but without the added anguish
of being responsible for setting things right. If they are saved, it will have to be done for them. This mythic
pattern assigns all blame to the male figures, divides suffering between male and female, and makes the
rejuvenation of the female contingent on the death of the male. In philosophical terms, the male is a subject
and the female is an object. Health and fruitfulness require the unity of male and female, of subject and
object, either before time in immediate experience or after time in transcendent experience. The
irresolvable dualism of subject and object (and of man and woman) in the center is inseparable from the
triumph of the relational consciousness that locks both into closed systems and prevents communion.

The main epistemological analogues of mythic male and mythic female are, respectively, reason and
perception. Reason (also, under some conditions, faith or revelation) provides knowledge of what cannot be
directly perceived. Mythic fathers, it will be remembered, are remote. They live in the sky and send down
their messages from a distance. When they visit the earth to engender heroes and kings in the wombs of
mortal women, they come in disguise. Their presence is usually unknown until it is announced by an oracle
after their departure. Their children know these sky fathers, if at all, by inference, faith, or revelation. And
their hero sons know them the same way. On the contrary, earth mothers and the mortal mothers of half-
gods are known empirically; they are present in the flesh to be directly experienced. These distinctions in
myth are equivalent to the obvious distinctions drawn from common experience. Mothers are known
empirically, in the womb and at the breast, but fathers are known, if at all, by believing the reports of
others. The same must be said, with even more emphasis, about the knowledge mothers and fathers have of
their children. Mothers know their children because they bear them; fathers know them as a matter of faith.
"Amor matris," says Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses, "subjective and objective genitive, is the only true thing in
life. Paternity may be a legal fiction."6

If it is granted that the mythic male is an equivalent of reason and faith as a way of knowing and that the
mythic female is an equivalent of empirical certainty, it follows that myths on the subject of the failure of
male and female to merge in a satisfactory way are symbolic renderings of the insufficiency of either
epistemological mode when separated from the other. The fundamental assumption in most
epistemological thought, during the entire history of such thought, is that reliable knowledge can be
achieved only when rational conclusions can be verified by observations or when observations fit into a
rationally derived pattern. Though both modes are mental, reason is experienced as a subjective process
and observation is experienced as objective. This is one of many variations on the need for a harmonious
and complementary coexistence of the polarities of self and other, male and female. In simpler terms,
deserts can bloom and metaphorical waste lands can be transformed only through the harmony of the
sexes. The connections between myth and epistemology could not have been missed by Eliot. He was a
student of Cornford and the Cambridge anthropologists, and Cornford From Religion to Philosophy: A Study
in the Origins of Western Speculation was published in 1912, shortly before Eliot began his seminar on myth
and interpretation with Professor Royce. Cornford's thesis, as indicated by his title, is that Greek
philosophy had its beginning in primitive myth and religion.

With these speculations in mind, consider the function of Tiresias in both Oedipus Rex and The Waste Land.
In the first, he is a reliable source of knowledge that others must gain only through an arduous process of
collecting evidence. In the second, he is exactly the same kind of source, but what he knows is trivial. In
Oedipus Rex, his androgyny is not relevant; in The Waste Land, it is emphasized for, having been both male
and female, he can fuse reason and perception into perfect knowledge.

For modern students of myth, such as Cornford, Weston, and Eliot himself, the fact that Tiresias is the only
figure in Sophocles' play who is qualified to interpret its action is related to his sexual history. Similarly, the
circumstances surrounding Oedipus can also be related to gender in myth. The crimes Oedipus is guilty of
are inseparable from the incompleteness of his knowledge. His crime is ignorance, and his punishment is
knowledge. In epistemological terms, the acts of parricide and maternal incest are the crimes of murdering
mind and marrying matter (no pun intended). Oedipus is ignorant because he has split reason from
observation and, conversely, he split them because he was ignorant. In mythic terms, by embracing his
mother he embraced the earth, and by killing his father he cut himself off from his transcendent origin.

The gods referred to in Oedipus Rex are transcendent, speaking only through oracles. They convey another
standard implication of myth: The important gods are remote and masculine. To worship mothers, the
land, or any earthly female is to commit the heresy and plain redundancy of worshiping the obvious. The
same issue occupies the center of Hamlet. The prince receives information from his father as transcendent
messenger, but in the process of seeking verification by observing his mother he moves through a series of
misperceptions into a fatal series of delays. In the closet scene in Hamlet, the son sees his father's spirit, but
his mother sees nothing. Eliot echoes this scene in the pseudodialogue of "A Game of Chess." This is a matter
of importance to which, in due course, we will return.

Consider, as the final item in this review of mythic associations, that the men of myth move on a rectilinear
time line between birth and death. Like Oedipus, they may make temporary curving paths backward toward
origins. Such a return is an outrage, and its ultimate failure and punishment confirm the necessity of going
beyond each moment of existence in a sequence of irreversible movements.

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment's surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed (lines 403-6)

Those who interpret Eliot's lines as related primarily to Kierkegaard or Sartre are missing the fundamental
mythic significance. Individual, unique selfhood is a function of that process of emerging from the cycles of
nature and taking steps into terrains which an age of prudence can never reverse. The final price of this
emergence from the seasonal and other cycles of nature is mortality, a final fact which closes the frame
around the life and individualizes it with a last irreversible event. The paradox of this mythic biography,
however, is that it both represents and makes possible the curvilinear immortality of the earth. Without
individuality, there are no heroes or kings, and without heroes or kings, there is no one to unify the land
through metonymic mergers and no one whose death can rejuvenate it when it is barren. When mythic
women become individuals, they do so, like Jocasta and Queen Gertrude, by the same process of
transcending nature and paying the price of mortality. Their tragedies, however, place their humanness at
the center of focus without placing them in a position to unify and rejuvenate the land. They merely suffer
and merely die. The catastrophes of mythic women are not last events that move the gods to take away
famine, plague, and political disorder. Their condition is for this reason more painful than that of the
heroes. They cannot become significant sufferers, and they are also isolated from the primal female
condition of being the oscillating earth itself. The way is now prepared for an understanding of The Waste
Land's gallery of unhappy women. Following our description of Eliot's method of presenting the women in
"A Game of Chess," we will return to these mythic analogues and to their relations to his philosophical
studies and his dissertation on F. H. Bradley.

"A Game of Chess" begins with thirty-three lines of description, the longest descriptive passage in the entire
poem. The scene consists of a woman seated before a mirror at her dressing table, evidently brushing her
hair. The woman herself is not described, but selected aspects of the room, its walls, its fireplace and
mantel, its contents, and its atmosphere are described in detail. The most remarkable thing about the
passage is the way it creates a powerful awareness of the woman without describing any part of her. The
single reference to her, at the end of the passage, "her hair/Spread out in fiery points/Glowed into words,
then would be savagely still," is so surrealistically transformed that it cannot be experienced as a descriptive
detail. Nevertheless, she is a clear presence at the center of her environment. The most noteworthy aspect
of that environment, beyond its designations of ornate affluence and its resemblance to a painting by
Fragonard, is that it consists mainly of signifiers pointing away from its occupant toward literary and
mythic figures.

The Chair she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Glowed on the marble, where the glass
Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines
From which a golden Cupidon peeped out
(Another hid his eyes behind his wing)
Doubled the flames of sevenbranched candelabra
Reflecting light upon the table as
The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it,
From satin cases poured in rich profusion;
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes,
Unguent, powdered, or liquid-troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window, these ascended
In fattening the prolonged candle-flames,
Flung their smoke into the laquearia,
Stirring the pattern on the coffered ceiling.
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam.
Above the antique mantel was displayed
As though a window gave upon the sylvan scene
The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king
So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale
Filled all the desert with inviolable voice
And still she cried, and still the world pursues,
"Jug Jug" to dirty ears.
And other withered stumps of time

Were told upon the walls; staring forms

Leaned out, leaning, hushing the room enclosed.
Footsteps shuffled on the stair.
Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair
Spread out in fiery points
Glowed into words, then would be savagely still.

The passage describes a room full of fragments of objects of art; interestingly, it is written in such a way that
the passage seems to be a replica of the room in that it too is full of bits and pieces of art. It begins with a
near-quote from Shakespeare--Enobarbu's description of Cleopatra on her barge. The notes connect
"laquearia" to the Aeneid and "sylvan scene" to Paradise Lost, bringing Dido and Eve in as vague parallels to
Cleopatra. The effect of such quotations and notes is to join the actual language of the poem to the objects it
describes. The room contains framed pictures of "the change of Philomel" above the mantel and of other
sad tales--"withered stumps of time"--decorating other parts of the wall; the stanza that describes them is
decorated with similar signifiers. In this particular passage, the poem tends to be close in kind to the event
it describes. Eliot's technique here is to have the language that describes the room describe itself at the
same time. His words and the objects they describe point at each other like facing mirrors. Eliot's
consciousness of this self-referentiality may account for the bizarre image in which the woman's hair glows
into words. They appear, from this perspective, to be the words of the poem itself.

One of the many fascinating aspects of this passage is that the language points both to itself and beyond
itself in all directions except toward the woman at the center of the picture, she whose room is described.
She is located within a system of differences, and that system is "hushing the room enclosed." Though
surrounded by significance, she signifies nothing herself and no signifier refers to her. Her room is cursive--
directly drawn--but she is recursive. Several points about the woman are noteworthy. First, she may be
young, middle-aged, or old. The passage gives no clue. Second, she may be beautiful or homely. Again, the
language keeps her appearance a secret. This would normally not arise as an issue. Marie, Madame
Sosostris, and the rest have no appearances at all, but the woman at her dressing table is surrounded with
so many vividly described things that her invisibility becomes a major datum arising from the reading
process. Third, she exists in an ambiguous time period. Her setting suggests the eighteenth century,
especially her use of candlelight in ornate seven-branched candelabra. But the fragment of the
"Shakespeherian Rag" and the reference to a "closed car" which appear in the lines to follow place her in the
exact period in which the poem was written, the early 1920s. Fourth, she may or may not be presented as a
real person. She could as easily be a recursive area in a painting. If she is not to be regarded as real, then the
voice that speaks at line 111 could be someone else who has been looking at the picture or imagining it. The
passage obliges us to hold these possibilities together as coexisting realities.

The detail about the woman's hair glowing into words is particularly suggestive. Whether or not it is read as
a reminder of the poem's self-reflexivity, it draws attention to the problematic relations between language
and images. The world encloses words, but words can be media enclosing worlds. Whenever the distinction
is subverted, as in the image of the woman's hair, the dualism of signs and things signified coalesces, for
brief moments, into a unity. Calling attention to that unity, however, reduces it to a merely conceptual unity
rather than a felt one.

The dressing room description contains a mixture of tangible and intangible objects. "'Chair," "marble,"
"candelabra," and the like are tangible, whereas "Reflecting light," "glitter," "odours," and "smoke" are
intangible. In this particular passage, the intangibles permeate and transform the tangibles. The glow on
the marble is more vivid than the marble itself, and the odors of perfumes cause the light to fling smoke
against the "laquearia," thus creating a "sad light" in which "a carved dolphin swam." Solids, free-floating
qualities, and figures in art works adjust themselves into a relation in which the five-floating qualities
dominate.

The single most important experience emerging from this analysis is the experience of objects in the
process of disappearing into the qualities that modify them. The hierarchical relation of nouns to adjectives
is reversed. Nouns or things are normally thought of as essential, their qualities as peripheral and
accidental. Here the qualities appear to take over the central position, calling attention to the idea that
objects are only bundles of adjectives, heaps of broken images. It is not only that the woman's room
becomes a parergon that displaces its central figure, the woman herself; it is also that each item within the
environment undergoes the equivalent displacement. The passage begins with the observation that "The
Chair . . . /Glowed on the marble," and "the glass/ . . . Doubled the flames of sevenbranched
candelabra/Reflecting light upon the table as/The glitter of her jewels rose to meet it." The chair vanishes
into the glow, the candelabra into its light and flames, the table into the light, the jewels disappear into their
glitter; and all of this light meets and is reflected in the mirror which would normally reflect the woman's
face. Light, whether as glow or glitter, is a variegated set of qualities surrounding, framing, and even
making visible the objects in the room, but here light swallows the objects it is supposed to reveal. In this
passage ergon and parergon do not change places in an oscillation. In fact, they cannot do so, for the
centers within the sets of framing qualities vanish as soon as one tries to form images of them by stripping
away the surface glitter in search of the solid thing within it.

These effects suggest that the passage is a verbal variation on impressionism, luminism, or any other kind
of painting that emphasizes light at the expense of the objects from which light is reflected. Such painting,
whether done with colors or words, energizes a dialectic of abstraction and empathy. The viewer (reader)
notes the absence of objects, or their removal into a vague distance, and then compensates for their
abstraction by making a conscious effort to see them clearly and thus bring them back into a space like his
own. The effort, when it succeeds, does so only partially and for brief moments. Things and their analyzed
qualities alternate as points of focus, producing the experience of alternating abstraction and empathy,
distance and closeness.

In Heart of Darkness, a work which was in Eliot's mind during the composition of The Waste Land, Conrad
provides both vivid examples of the luministic technique and a commentary on its implications.

In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned
sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked,
with gleams of varnished spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness.
The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom,
brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.7

Two pages later, after several more descriptive passages of a similar kind, Conrad introduces his narrator,
Marlow. Conrad's explanation of the way Marlow tells a story is a commentary on the way Conrad is writing
this novella, a set of instructions to the reader of Heart of Darkness.

The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked
nut. But Marlow was not typical . . . and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but
outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of
those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.8

By alerting his reader to the issues of surface qualities and central essences, Conrad presents him with an
interpretative key. By the time Marlow interprets Kurtz as "hollow to the core," the reader has been
immersed in a world where everything is either a shell without content or a cloud of free-floating adjectives.

Eliot's woman in the first half of "A Game of Chess" is, like Conrad's Kurtz, the hollowness at the center of a
field of hollow surfaces. In a specific philosophical sense, she is a metaphysical substance, that which is left
over after every perceivable quality is removed. Like the invisible man in films, she is known only when she
is covered up. When naked, the invisible man cannot be known except as a voice. The woman in the poem is
an absence manifested by her enclosing surfaces and by her voice. It thus is not at all unlikely, at this stage
of analysis, that Eliot is suggesting that she be imagined as a ghost, an impalpable and intangible essence.

The long description of the woman's dressing room is ended by a reference to footsteps shuffling on the
stairs. The caller is male, presumably her husband. A quasi-dramatic scene follows in which the woman, a
person who has been presented as an absence, speaks to a man who remains silent but who ceaselessly
thinks and responds mentally. Her words, indicated by quotation marks, are juxtaposed throughout the
scene with his thoughts. Eliot uses the same technique in a much earlier poem, "Portrait of a Lady," where
it also conveys the isolation of a woman and her gentleman caller.
"My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. "Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak. "What
are you thinking of? What thinking? What? "I never know what you are thinking. Think."

I think we are in rats' alley Where the dead men lost their bones.

"What is that noise?" The wind under the door. "What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"

Nothing again nothing.

"Do

"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "Nothing?"

I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes. "Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag-- It's so elegant So intelligent "What shall I do now? What shall I do?" "I
shall rush out as I am, and walk the street "With my hair down, so. What shall we do to-morrow? "What
shall we ever do?"

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four. And we shall play a game of chess, Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a
knock upon the door.

The man and woman in this scene provide textbook examples of what Bradley means by relational
experience. They cannot experience communion or transcendence of any kind because they are isolated,
imprisoned in their own heads. Every sensation, every feeling, is filtered through the mind, through
memories and desires and desperate needs and fears. This situation is particularly noteworthy because, as
Calvin Bedient has pointed out and as is evident in the Facsimile,9 this man and woman are linked to the
hyacinth girl and her lover in "The Burial of the Dead," and thus should be associated with one of the most
poignant evocations of lost immediacy in the entire poem. The questions the woman addresses to her
present visitor are patterned exactly upon the confession of the hyacinth lover. "I could not/Speak, and my
eyes failed, I was neither/Living nor dead, and I knew nothing." In the passage at hand, the woman asks

"Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember "'Nothing?" . . . . . "Are you alive, or not? Is
there nothing in your head?"

Actually, locked into relational experience, he is paralyzed by knowing, by remembering, by thinking, by

interpreting. He remembers his previous experiences of unity and by thinking about them makes them a
part of his present prison. In the original drafts of The Waste Land, the question "Do you remember
nothing?" is followed by "I remember/The hyacinth garden."10 The parallels between the two scenes include
emphasis on the woman's hair, wet in the first passage, dry and spread out in fiery points in the second.
Hair is also mentioned in connection with the woman's threat of running out onto the street as she is
(presumably in her dressing gown) with her hair down. The parallels include, in addition, emphasis on a
"heart of light." In the hyacinth garden passage, the term seems to refer to an immediate experience, in the
Bradleian sense; in the boudoir scene, the all-obliterating light is associated with enclosure in the woman's
room, with entrapment in a system of qualities--in other words, with relational experience in the Bradleian
sense.

The association of this woman and her visitor with the hyacinth girl and her lover suggests that the
background of this scene indudes moments of high passion. In the present situation, the male interprets
that background in highly negative terms. His response to the woman's question about what he is thinking
is "I think we are in rats' alley/Where the dead men lost their bones." In the Facsimile drafts, his response
was "I think we met first in rats' alley."11 Noticing the change from "we met first in" to "we are in" rats' alley
reveals the fact that the male is interpreting the history of the relationship and that part of his
interpretation involves the backward extension of their present isolation over the immediate experience of
the hyacinth garden. He seems to say that they are in rats' alley and indeed have always been there, for that
is where they met. This transforms the hyacinth garden itself into a rats' alley. Like Prufrock and Gerontion,
the male here is always thinking, and as with them, the consequences include isolation, loss of senses,
paralysis, death. He filters the present through art and religion, through Shakespeare and Madame
Sosostris, for he remembers the line from The Tempest which appears in the middle of her reading of the
tarot cards and is followed by "Here is Belladonna." Again like Prufrock, this man sings to himself. His
Shakespearean rag picks up both the beautiful transformation line--"Those are pearls that were his eyes"--
and, as Grover Smith has observed, the hollow howls ("O O O O") of Lear and Othello.12 The startling
backward superimposition of this diseased relationship upon the hyacinth garden lovers, of the quasi-
hysterical neurasthenic upon the hyacinth girl with her arms full of flowers, of the intellectual and remote
male upon the passionate lover, and of the room with the mirror upon the heart of light compels the reader
from perspective to perspective without respite.

The conjecture that the woman in this scene may be a ghost assumes special relevance when it is
remembered that Hamlet is a major subtext in the poem (particularly in this section), and when it is noted
that her speech to her silent visitor echoes the closet scene in Hamlet. Startled by the spirit of his father,
Hamlet asks his mother if she sees it. She, of course, sees nothing. Startled by wind, the woman in this scene
asks her visitor what it is. He has heard all of this before, knows the mornings, evenings, afternoons, and
does not bother to answer. But he does see her and take note of her comments. For the reader, however, she
is invisible, a voice emanating from the empty space at the center of a long description of her environment.
For the reader, the effect is that of a ghost speaking. The effect is a cursive-recursive oscillation of female
essence and actual female. The woman is a cubistic overlapping of viewpoints, a ghost asking her visitor if
he can see a ghost. The reader cannot see the woman, and her visitor cannot see the ghost.

The ghost motif in the scene is reduced to another level of irony within irony by the use of wind as its initial
stimulus in the woman's mind. Eliot is using a familiar etymological pun. Most words for spirit, ghost,
mind, and soul have evolved from words that once meant only wind or breath. The ambiguity is seen in
such words as inspiration and respiration, Geist, gust, ghost, and aghast. In "Gerontion," Eliot uses wind
not to mean spirit but to mean the absence of spirit; he strips wind of its religious and mythic values by
forcing the reader to understand it as mere wind. The following lines, for example, conclude a section that
describes an ambiguous communion service in "depraved May."

Vacant shuttles Weave the wind. I have no ghosts, An old man in a draughty house Under a windy knob.

Similarly, in "What the Thunder Said," the chapel is empty, "only the wind's home" (line 388). A chapel is
supposed to be the home of the spirit of God, and the Chapel Perilous in the grail story is haunted by evil
spirits, but here the chapel is neither occupied by spirit nor haunted by ghosts. On the contrary, it contains
only literal wind and is haunted by the absence of spirit. Eliot here reverses the history of words, taking
meanings back to their origins. In other parts of the poem, he does the same with water; he demythologizes
it, turning its power to cleanse and purify into the physical effect that it has upon a victim of drowning.

To return to the passage at hand, the woman is startled by wind. At first, she is afraid, thinking the noise
might indicate danger. She wants to know what it is and what it is doing. Her first question causes the man
to reflect that wind is only wind, but her second-- "What is the wind doing?"--reminds him of a passage
from Dante in which wind had a definite function and a definite meaning. He remembers Paolo and
Francesca in the second circle of Hell being punished for lust. In the Facsimile, the question "What is the
wind doing?" is followed by "Carrying/Away the little light dead people." As Valerie Eliot points out in the
Facsimile notes, this line is an allusion to Dante's desire in Inferno 5 to speak to those two who go together
carried lightly on the wind.13 This means that the man in "A Game of Chess" fluctuates between hearing
wind that is only wind and, at the same time, wind that is both the spirit and the agent of God, punishing
the spirits of humans for sins committed in the flesh. Wind is of course also speech. Words are wind woven
by the shuttles of throat and mouth into systems of difference. And wind is not only divine spirit, the breath
of God, but also human spirit, the breath of life. Insofar as the woman in this part of the poem is a ghost,
she is wind producing wind (words) signifying fear of wind (ghosts). Insofar as she is an actual person, she
is also wind producing wind.

The silent visitor acknowledges his linkage to the troubled woman by including himself as her partner in
tomorrows chess game: "And we shall play a game of chess." He also includes himself as her companion in
the predictable trivialities of a typical day. The chess game is a way of superimposing an order of an
artificial kind on the already dearly ordered day. It is sometimes suggested that a game, like art, has order
whereas life has none, but that is a mistaken assumption. The passage specifically refers to the order of a
hotwater bottle at ten and a closed car at four. By doing so, the passage reveals a rigid and utterly boring
order, an invariable structure of days and nights that is repeated endlessly. What is called for is
unpredictability as an evasion of the diurnal cycle's pattern. In Man's Rage for Chaos, Morse Peckham
advances the fascinating thesis that art is often a means of introducing anarchy into the painful order of life.
He reverses all the clichés in this area of discourse and makes a fine, though overstated, case.14 The Waste
Land as a whole might be seen as such art, as Eliot's contribution to the universal effort to subvert the
tedium of natural cycles and conventional narrative structures.

In the passage under discussion, the game must be seen as an alternative way of structuring time. Within
the game, there are unambiguous rules and definite purposes, but outcomes are usually unpredictable.
Outside the game, there are no dear rules and no final purposes, but everything is completely predictable.
There is an occlusion of two orders in the images of their lives and their game. The difficulty with
Peckham's thesis is the same as the difficulty with the opposing cliché. Order and chaos are not polar
opposites; they are results of judgments made from different perspectives. Within one closed system, any
other system appears ordered in a different way. A worker, for example, may long for his vacation and,
halfway through his vacation, long for a return to work. What seems to be a satisfactory structure is a
sequence of changing or overlapping structures.

These observations bring us back to the concepts of transcendent experience and binary perspectives.
Disorder is related to seeing anything from within a single system, from a single point of view; order is
related to seeing one or more systems from a position outside those systems, a position which enables the
viewer to perceive them as a unity. The mode of consciousness implied by the judgment that contraries are
part of more comprehensive wholes is suggestive of what Bradley and Eliot called transcendent knowledge
and what we have called mythic consciousness. This does not mean that the figures in the scene will achieve
a unitive cognition. They will continue to experience the orders of day and game as parallel patterns while
waiting for something unexpected, "a knock upon the door." From the reader's perspective, however, the
lovers and the chess players, their mornings and afternoons, their time patterns inside and outside the
game, along with the eventual knock upon the door that balances the earlier footsteps that shuffled on the
stair, along with the ambiguities of ghostliness and tangibility, cursive antiquity and recursive lives within
it, move in the direction of a transcendent unity. This unity contains rather than resolves paradoxes. The
fragments move toward unity because they can be perceived from perspectives outside all of their
enclosures. The demand for transcendence of paradox is addressed to the reader, not to the characters in
the poem. They have no way of imagining its possibility. Their "lidless eyes" cannot evade the persistent
glow and glitter of their irresolvable world. These observations have nothing to do with metaphysics. They
assert only that a figure in an impressionistic painting has no choice but to remain as an arrangement of
jagged and disconnected spots of color, whereas a viewer of the painting is free to look for a perspective that
resolves the fragments into something he can identify.

"A Game of Chess," as we have pointed out, is a diptych with a Shakespearean frame. As is true in all
diptychs, the panels are both similar and dissimilar. In this case, each panel portrays an unfruitful sexual
relationship. Within this similarity, however, the panels can instantly be seen as contrasts. The setting of
the first is a dressing room, and both general scene and props suggest affluence. The characters are
nameless and faceless, but they pose and speak and think in such a way that there can be no doubt that they
belong to the upper middle classes. The setting of the second part of this diptych is a pub. The main
character, who is absent, is named Lil, a truncated form of Lily, the flower of Easter, the flower of the
"cruellest month" in the waste land. Her husband, like many boys born in Queen Victoria's reign, bears the
name of Albert, the royal consort. And one of the sons, like many boys born to English soldiers fighting in
the First World War, is named for King George V. The speaker in this scene, a friend of Lil and Albert,
speaks and behaves in a manner that leaves no doubt that she and her friends are poor and belong to the
lower social classes.

When Lils' husband got demobbed, I said-- I didn't mince my words, I said to her myself, HURRY UP
PLEASE ITS TIME Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart. He'll want to know what you done
with that money he gave you To get yourself some teeth. He did, I was there. You have them all out, Lil, and
get a nice set, He said, I swear, I can't bear to look at you. And no more can't I, I said, and think of poor
Albert, He's been in the army four years, he wants a good time, And if you don't give it him, there's others
will, I said. Oh is there, she said. Something oʹ that, I said. Then I'll know who to thank, she said, and give
me a straight look. HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME If you don't like it you can get on with it, I said. Others
can pick and choose if you can't. But if Albert makes off, it won't be for lack of telling. You ought to be
ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can't help it, she said, pulling a long face,
It's them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She's had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The
chemist said it would be alright, but I've never been the same. You are a proper fool, I said.

Well, if Albert won't leave you alone, there it is, I said,

What you get married for if you don't want children?
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot--
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight
Ta ta. Goonight. Goonight.
Good night, ladies, good night sweet ladies, good night, good night.

The characters in the boudoir scene exist in a private room in a private world and long for change, for some
significant catastrophe that would impose structure and interject meaning into their daily round. The
characters in the pub scene exist in a public place; they anticipate major changes in their lives, "if Albert
makes off," and recall past events that have profound consequences. The first scene is characterized by light
and in part by silence, the second by shadows and rapid speech, with the narrator contending with the
barman for attention. The woman in the first part is present but invisible; on the other hand, Lil, the focal
figure of the second part, is absent but visible, vividly and empathetically evoked. The first woman's age,
appearance, and health are not revealed; indeed, her very existence is called into question. But Lil is clearly
presented. She is thirty-one years of age, looks much older, has bad teeth, has borne five children; she has
misspent her allowance and ruined her health with an abortion; she is married to Albert who has just
completed four years of service in the army, who is disgusted with her appearance and threatens to leave
her for someone who is still able to give him a good time. Lil serves hot gammon for Sunday dinner, invites
her friend over when Albert is home, and tells the friend all their troubles. The reader is as overwhelmed
with personal data here as he or she was with information about decor in the earlier scene. What do these
contrasting methods imply, and what happens when they are brought together as a single framed portrait?

The answers emerge when the female figures in the two panels are superimposed. The first is a recursive
area within a picture, a presence out of which a voice emanates. The second is a cursive picture with a past,
a probable future of abandonment, and no voice at all. The first, to put it another way, has no body. She
exists beneath the seeable qualities of light and shade. The second has a body that is a severe burden to her
and a husband who exists only to exploit it on the rare occasions when he is present. The first feels the
stress of not knowing how to impose a straight line structure upon her repetitious days and nights, whereas
the second is trapped in an ongoing process of events that makes her both a victim of biology and a victim
of mistaken attempts to alter its processes. Lil is being destroyed by both fertility and an effort to avoid it,
and the whole situation is likely to cause the loss of her only source of security, Albert, who is also the
source of her suffering. Too little sense of structure in the first woman is matched with too much in the
second. The result of the superimposition of the two is a cubistic portrait of a woman. Eliot's technique here
does not allow this portrait to be viewed as one figure; it forces the reader to see an overlapping, faceted,
and layered structure. This compound structure is Eliot's portrait of a lady, his suggestion of the female
presence which suffers at the center of and which in myth is identical with a waste land. The realization that
Eliot in "A Game of Chese" has created a framed diptych of a woman causes the earlier females-- the Sibyl,
Marie, the hyacinth girl, Isolde, Madame Sosostris--to return as facets of the picture, and later in the poem
the typist, Thames daughters, and others will also add facets.

Allusions also contribute facets to this emerging portrait. Cleopatra is a reference to the use of sexuality to
gain political power, Dido to the use of political power to hold the wandering warrior Aeneas. The first is
destroyed by Rome after she had captivated with feminine charm two of its leaders, whereas the second is
destroyed by the future founder of Rome when she fails to captivate him. Eve is the mythic source of
fertility and the victim of Satan's seduction; Philomela is a mythic figure who was raped and mutilated by
the barbarous king and then transformed into an "inviolable voice," the nightingale. Ophelia is a reference
to innocence driven to madness and death as a result of tangled events which have only a tangential relation
to her. And as Grover Smith has recently pointed out, Shakespeare's Imogen, also victimized by men, is
undoubtedly present. Most of the descriptive details in the boudoir scene come from Iachimo's description
of his wife's bedroom, details he is memorizing in order to humiliate her. Smith notes that the tapestry in
Imogen's room depicts Cleopatra on her barge and that Imogen has fallen asleep reading "The tale of
Tereus," the page "turn'd down/Where Philomel gave up."15 Cleopatra, Eve, Dido, Philomela, Ophelia,
Imogen--all of these doomed women exist as adjuncts to male power and as victims of it. Aspects of all of
them are distributed throughout the composite portrait of a lady presented by "A Game of Chess."

Many critics take one or more of these figures-- Cleopatra, Dido, Philomela, Eve, Ophelia--as the
perspective from which to interpret the contemporary figures. Specific literary and mythic figures, however,
cannot form a point from which to interpret contemporary women, for the literary and mythic women are
also part of Eliot's picture, variations on the contemporary figures. A perspective can be discovered by
returning to the myths undergirding Eliot's poem. As we pointed out early in this chapter, a waste land in
myth is a barren or unhealthy woman. Lil is unhealthy and now perhaps barren from the effects of the
abortifacient. The first woman is mentally distressed and virtually paralyzed. Both are depleted physically,
intellectually, spiritually. In myth, the land is rendered barren by the failures and sins of males. Lil has
become sick and perhaps barren by being treated as an adjunct of Albert's lust. The first woman, in a more
subtle way, has also been paralyzed by a male, whom she now begs to give her a structure she cannot
imagine providing for herself. Further, women in myth represent the condition of the circularity of the
seasons and generations. The first woman is trapped in empty revolutions of repetitious days. She longs for
anything (even catastrophe) that will enable her to escape the tormenting cycles of her life. Her "Stay with
me" doubles Lil's fear that Albert will leave her and, along with the earth mothers of myth, defines her
existence and health as contingent on male potency and continence. The feeling established by the allusions
makes it certain that he will not stay with her and that, in due course, Albert too will vanish. Like Prufrock,
who thought of himself as a secondary character, only "an attendant lord," in the story of his own life,
women are supporting players in the dramas of their personal existence. From the perspective supplied by
myth, it is clear that perceiving women as secondary characters or supporting players in the game of life
leads to a waste land.

Finally, myth associates females with direct experience and males with reason, faith, or some other method
of gaining knowledge of what cannot be observed. In myth, female closeness and male remoteness form the
complementary conditions for both health and knowledge. In The Waste Land, such complementarity does
not exist, and as in myth, this absence of connection is associated with disease and waste. Eliot's women
exhibit reversals of the standard mythic modes of knowing. The first woman sees what is not there
(reflections of reflections of reflections), and she misinterprets what she hears, the wind under the door.
Also, she loses her sense of smell, which is drowned in strange synthetic perfumes. Further, she herself
cannot be seen by the reader, just as the absent Lil cannot be seen by the characters in the tavern. The point
is that, in this poem, the empirical mode associated in myth with women is defeated or distorted. This
defeat of the empirical is conveyed both by their words and actions in the poem and by Eliot's mode of
presenting them in verbal colors and sounds. The world associated with experience and observation is
presented as an unclassifiable array of unstable relations or broken images.

The failure of men to cohere with women is, from the perspective of myth, the failure of rational processes
to cohere with observations. The objects of reason and faith are abstract, like Eliot's first woman, and the
objects of perception are empathetic, like his second woman, Lil. But here both kinds of objects, abstract
and empathetic, are feminine; no complement of opposites occurs, and thus no certainty or health exists.
An obvious implication is that androgyny is a mythic analogue of knowledge. Tiresias, therefore, sees all
because he is a complete, self-contained structure of opposites. In the absence of androgyny, collaboration
between male and female is the necessary condition of both health and knowledge. At this point in the
analysis, it should be clear that categories normally compartmentalized into isolated mental cells should be
thought of together. The categories are, first, erotic life and, second, intellectual life. In "The Metaphysical
Poets," Eliot located the dissociation of these categories in the English poetic tradition, but he was deeply
aware that the divorce of erotic from intellectual, plea sure from knowledge, feeling from thought, was a
recurring catastrophe in history and before it. It was, in fact, the basis for both religion and art. The
challenge is to remarry the two modes. In The Waste Land, the unlikelihood of that reconciliation is
presented, but presented in a way that obliges those who wish to read it to search for modes of transcendent
perception. A poem of despair can be known only through a reading method that implies absurd hope.
Our reading of The Waste Land is based on Eliot's own ideas about the interpretation of interpretations, as
stated in his graduate school papers and in his dissertation. Before pursuing our reading into later parts of
the poem, we would like to call attention to a few specific points he made in regard to the interpretation of
myth and in regard to the difference between facts and interpretation. Some of Eliot's most interesting
remarks on these subjects occur in a graduate school paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual.16 In this
paper and in other discussions of myth, it is clear that Eliot had mixed feelings about Frazer work in The
Golden Bough. As a collector and classifier of folklore, Frazer was superb. But as an interpreter of his
material, he was not to be trusted. The major problem was Frazer's lack of attention to the nature of
interpretation. Frazer collected myths and fragments of myths and then tried to reconstruct their original
meaning. But as Eliot points out, his facts (myths) are themselves interpretations. Furthermore, they are
his own interpretations, not the interpretations of the people who in the distant past grounded their
religion in them.17 In the introduction to Savonarola, Eliot mentions some of the problems he had been
wrestling with for well over a decade.

Some years ago, in a paper on The Interpretation of Primitive Ritual, I made an humble attempt to show that in
many cases no interpretation of a rite could explain its origin. For the meaning of the series of acts is to the
performers themselves an interpretation; the same ritual remaining practically unchanged may assume
different meanings for different generations of performers; and the rite may even have originated before
"meaning" meant anything at all.18

The most important implication for our immediate purpose is that Eliot sees history as a sequence of
varying interpretations of interpretations of interpretations, with subsequent interpretations blocking
access to former ones. It is a situation in which original interpretations are absolutely irrecoverable. And as
he remarks, the rite may have originated in what could be called the immediate experience of the race,
before the conscious experience of meaning became a datum in human minds.

In reading "A Game of Chess," we have used a perspective from the traditional associations within myth,
associations which relate females to observation and males to reason or faith. We regard these associations
not as facts about the primitive mind but as facts about the tradition of interpreting myth. Both in his
graduate school papers and in his dissertation, Eliot is clear about the difference between facts and
interpretations. Following Bradley, he defines a fact as "a point of attention which has only one aspect, or
which can be treated under one aspect. A fact, then, is an ideal construction, and has its existence within a
more or less variable sphere of practical or scientific interest."19 In this definition, a fact does not exist in
and of itself; it is generated by paying attention to or noticing something. Two terms are needed for a fact:
the one who attends and the point attended to and isolated thereby from everything else. But three terms
are needed for an interpretation: the one who attends, the point attended, and the entity or class of entities
signified by that point of attention. The interpretation is created (and the fact destroyed) by the attribution
of significance. A signifier (such as a religious rite) can remain the same whereas its significance (its
meaning) can change from generation to generation, from person to person within one generation, and
even from person to person within a single family. Eliot argues in his seminar paper that what one
generation calls fact the next will call interpretation, but actually, both generations are dealing with
interpretations.
An important consequence of this way of thinking is that facts as such can, by definition, have no meanings
at all. This is not an argument that the universe or life has no meaning. Such an entity as "life" cannot fit the
definition of a fact as an isolated point of attention; and even if it could, the attribution of meaning would
dissolve its status as a fact, would transform it into an interpretation. The definition also implies that facts
can only exist in a brief instant of time, since points of attention have a tendency to point in other directions
toward alternative facts; that is, points of attention

tend quickly to take on significance. After the phase of immediate experience, facts or signifieds move into a
phase of relational experience in which they become signifiers--and so on in a sequence with no limit this
side of a metaphysical absolute.

The relevance of these notions to the human conditions of lovelessness, confusion, and paralysis
dramatized in The Waste Land becomes clearer when it is recalled that facts, whether they are defined
technically as Eliot defined them, or assumed in common sense as most people define them, are normally
associated with observation; interpretations, on the other hand, whether defined technically or not, are
normally associated with reason or faith. In terms of the. history of the interpretation of myth, facts are
objective and feminine, whereas interpretation is subjective and masculine. Our reading of the poem is
inseparable from the following point: Neither facts nor females, however one thinks of either term, can
exist in isolation from a rationally or emotionally derived environment. Objects, whether they are persons
or stones, cannot even be imagined except in relation to a framing subject. In his dissertation, Eliot put it
this way:

Facts are not merely found in the world and laid together like bricks, but every fact has in a sense its place
prepared for it before it arrives, and without the implication of a system in which it belongs the fact is not a
fact at all. The ideality essential to fact means a particular point of view, and means the exclusion of other
aspects of the same point of attention. There is a sense, then, in which any science--natural or social--is a
priori: in that it satisfies the needs of a particular point of view, a point of view which may be said to be
more original than any of the facts that are referred to that science.20

Points of view are subjective fields in which points of attention occur. Subjectivity, whether it is in a rational
or an emotional phase, whether it is reading Spinoza or falling in love, writing on Bradley or marrying Miss
Haigh-Wood, is necessary to the existence of objectivity. Early in this chapter, in a review of conventional
associations with myth, we noted that the terms "woman," "land," and "objective observation" are linked
and that the terms "man," "remoteness" or "invisibility," and "reason" or "faith" are linked in a parallel way.
We also noted the epistemological tradition that defined knowledge as either a direct perception in a
context or a rational inference drawn from such perceptions. Certain knowledge occurs when both rational
and empirical operations reach identical conclusions. When we put these associations and traditions
together, both in their narrative forms in myth and in their abstract forms in logic, and then add Eliot's key
arguments given first on the issue of interpreting primitive ritual and later on the implications of Bradley's
ideas, we have constructed the context in which The Waste Land resides and in which it should be read. In "A
Game of Chess," the focus is upon the disconnection of men from women and upon all that such a rupture
implies. In "The Fire Sermon," as we shall show, the focus is upon the consequences of a loss of desire. That
loss has awesome implications as, soon, we shall see.