He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist by Calvin Bedient (review)

Book Reviews75 Works Reviewed Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 300 p. De Lauretis, Teresa, ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986. 231 p. Jacobus, Mary. Reading Wrman: Essays in Feminist Criticism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 316 p. Kaplan, Cora. Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism. London: Verso, 1986. 232 p. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985. 244 p. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 186 p. CALVIN BEDIENT. He Do the Police in Different Voices: The Waste Land and Its Protagonist. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986. 225 p. Most teachers of literature must experience the frustration that comes from accumulating, over the years, more and more things to say about a favorite text without a corresponding increase in available class time. Many must yearn for an occasion to present everything they know, line by line, unconstrained by bells, syllabi, or students' attention spans. Calvin Bedient seems to have found such an occasion in this book on T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, which devotes eight pages to a discussion of the title and epigraph alone and proceeds through each verse paragraph at a comparably leisurely pace. Bedient's thesis is that "all the voices in the poem are the performances of a single protagonist — not Tiresias but a nameless stand-in for Eliot himself" who is " 'dramatizing' . . . the history of his own religious awakening" (ix). The protagonist begins in a state of "abjection," compounded of "secular estrangement" (28), "desire that cannot be satisfied" (13), and obscure Oedipal yearnings. The narrative, half-concealed by the various roles the protagonist assumes and voices he mimics, is nevertheless remarkably coherent, in Bedient's view. For example, he argues that the protagonist marries the hyacinth girl of "The Burial of the Dead" and that she then becomes the nervous wife in "A Game of Chess." Despite the abundance of mimetic detail, Bedient sees the mode as fundamentally allegorical and even provides a "Bunyanized" plot summary: "After suffering a loss of Romantic belief in the vicinity of the Hyacinth Garden, Pilgrim, hearing a voice reproach him with being the Son of man, and uncertain of his way, visits the fortune telling booth in Vanity Fair, and is warned to Fear Death by Water. ... He marries 76Rocky Mountain Review Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks — a fiery Medusa who turns his penis to stone — and wanders the banks of the Thames, a voyeur of slimy rats' bellies, cigarette ends, horny London traffic, typists scarcely forced" (60). By the end of "The Fire Sermon," the protagonist has had enough of the Waste Land, and his "story advances to his election of asceticism" (155). In "Death by Water" he "fantasizes a death that is utter, a complete reducing back of the natural and psychical creature into nothingness" (160), in preparation for the ascent of the mountain in "What the Thunder Said." Finally, in his response to the voice of the thunder, the protagonist has "attained to an altitude where every speech knows its relation to God" (197). Bedient sees the protagonist as Eliot's version of Conrad's Kurtz, "a man who had gone to the end of abjection" (206) but who, unlike Kurtz, is able to go beyond "the horror" to a recognition "that reality (for must there not somewhere be a reality?) is purely metaphysical" (207). Any "new" reading of a much-read literary work must explain why its insights were missed by previous commentators. Bedient proposes that "Skepticism still rules the criticism of this fundamentally unskeptical poem" (216) because Eliot's protagonist, like Hieronymo, has constructed "an elaborate trap for those inimical to his purpose" in order to avoid being "easily found out" by unbelieving readers: "What he will not say out directly and betrayingly is that he believes — more, that his God is the Unnameable, and that he would forsake the whole earth for a single drop from the clouds huddling near the Absolute" (215). Bedient overstates the originality of his interpretation. He is certainly...