ABSTRACT
T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land epitomizes a traumatized age. The magnitude of World War I sustains its stupefying effect years after the Armistice, while its costs and consequences continue to afflict private/public finance and incite further political conflicts. A sense of loss, deprivation, and even betrayal, deepened by memory and desire, permeates The Waste Land. In its dissonant and disturbing poetic style, it delivers the prevailing social (mental) strife of the postwar Britain. Trapped between the irretrievable past and an unborn future, Eliot, ridden with financial worries and verging on a nervous breakdown, instinctively followed his literary forebears and embarked on a descent journey to raise the dead and uncover the “dark ground of Being.” Almost Freudian, The Waste Land is a psychiatric archeological inquiry in pursuit of the origin of civilization and its discontent.
Focusing on The Waste Land’s overt preoccupation with monetary and commercial activities of London, the paper devotes itself to an investigation of how The Waste Land extrapolates the Katabasis narrative and its dynamics to expound the complex entanglement of “memory and desire” and its accentuated manifestation as the fundamental drive of modernity and world economy. The epical Katabasis that traverses the original boundary of bodily living and shadowy dead not only relates Waste Land’s economic concerns to the trials of epic heroes shouldering a communal fate but also serves as a perfect metaphoric form to dramatize the gradual departure of modern capitalist economy from actual material production into abstract numeric speculation and power relation. Enacted through a style of modern radio play, voice fragments from different memory stratum, both personal and collective, are re-sounded. Contemporary personal memories are mapped onto a shared historical/cultural terrain that has bred contemporary economic crises and moral decays. The supposedly autonomous modern subject is but caught in a pre-existing circuit of eternal return, driven by desire. From Greek mythology to Wagner’s opera, from Arthurian legend to Baudelaire, voices of wanton desire are evoked and merged with the anxieties of a modern Londoner, lost among the brisk money circulation. Eliot’s modern waste land is encumbered by excess not material scarcity, thereby, the paradox between excessive water and drought. As if an ironic echo of Cumaean Sibyl’s remark of her fading physique, the spectacle of modern economy has absolved itself from tangible matter, and yet, in its unbounded form, it endures to demand acknowledgment of that most egoistic but deleterious eros and augurs fortune.
