Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

T. S. Eliot and the Cubists

1980; Duke University Press; Volume: 26; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/441241

2325-8101

David Tomlinson,

Samuel Beckett and Modernism

further The Waste Land recedes into the past, the more it comes to seem characteristic of its period. Our critical fascination with the poem is largely attributable to the status it has acquired as some isolated aberration, magisterial but still an aberration because it violates the essentially linear and sequential nature of literary presentation. However, it is beginning to emerge in a new guise as a masterpiece in the mainstream of European culture, appropriating for poetry techniques of visual presentation which Picasso and Braque had recently invented for painting. One knows this view has not yet become orthodoxy-in the whole of a symposium on the poem,1 celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, there is only one sentence acknowledging the similarities between the poem's stylistic innovations and cubist techniques-but it is one met more often now that we have the modern movement more clearly in focus. similarities were first pointed out in a perceptive article by Jacob Korg in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism in 1960.2 As this article is not widely known, I shall briefly paraphrase its conclusions. Korg's first point of comparison is with analytical cubism of late 1909 to 1911, the pictures in which Picasso and Braque finally dispensed with every convention of perspective. subject was dissected, and the resulting fragments, painted from many different angles, were reassembled in overlapping planes in a design in which the different viewpoints were presented simultaneously. In the later paintings, the conventionally recognizable shape of the subject virtually disappeared in a representation which the painters claimed was much truer to the actual multidimensional nature of the subject than the conventional way of representing the perspective that we see. This fragmentation and reintegration in a new shape is observable in The Waste Land. Eliot's