Patrick Mooney
English 130D
Modernist Anxiety:
An Examination of the Relationships between Narrator and Objects of Poetic Concern in Several Poems by Eliot and Williams
A close examination of the relations between the narrators of several of Williams's and Eliot's poems and the objects about which they speak in these poems shows that these relations between the perceiving, reflecting subject and the object or objects framed by the words are fundamentally infused with an anxiety that pervades the subject-object relations in the poems. This anxiety, moreover, is not merely a general modernist anomie or dis-ease directed toward the poetic objects themselves, but rather the specific and rigorously structured anxiety analyzed by the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger in his 1927 Being and Time.
One of the traditional view of the subject-object relationship as consisting of two fundamentally separated entities which merely exist [1] in space. Essentially, Heidegger argues that although it is possible to see "subjects" and "objects" in the traditional, radically separated, merely existent manner, both human beings [2] and the things with which they deal have a more fundamental relationship missed by the philosophical and intellectual tradition. For Heidegger, humans relate to things in the world most fundamentally by using them as pieces of equipment; he calls this way of relating to things "readiness-to-hand." Looking specifically at a hammer, for instance, Heidegger notes that the craftsman employing the hammer for its intended purpose -- i.e., hammering -- has a more basic, fundamental grasp of the tool's use than does someone who simply contemplates the act of hammering (98).
In fact, Heidegger argues that detached, theoretical contemplation as a way of relating to things is a derivative mode of the more basic manner of relating to them as useful things. The beginning of theoretical contemplation comes, for Heidegger, when a piece of equipment stops being useful for its intended task -- when a hammer is broken, or lost, and can no longer be used to pound nails. At that point, it becomes necessary to ponder the hammer and the network of relations in which we attempt to use it in order to solve the problem in some way: by repairing the hammer, by finding another hammer or something that will function as one, by giving up completely on the current task, or in some other manner (102-104). In the normal process of merely hammering, however, the activity is carried out without the necessity to contemplate the hammer and its use theoretically or intellectually (98).
The fact that a person relates to a piece of equipment, such as a hammer, most fundamentally through its usability implies that this more basic (Heidegger's term is "primordial") relationship is not one in which an isolated human simply uses an isolated hammer, but that the hammer exists as a hammer because it has a specific utility for specific human tasks. This more primordial relationship is starkly different from the relationship constituted by theoretical reflection, as discussed above. However, it is this basic orientation toward a relationship with objections based on utility and shared sociocultural meaning, analyzed by Heidegger throughout Being and Time, that the narrators of Williams's and Eliot's poems frequently lack.
This attitude toward detached contemplation of is immediately apparent in Williams's "The Great Figure." In this poem, a narrator describes seeing a large number on the side of a "firetruck" driving urgently by with "gong clangs/ siren howls/ and wheels rumbling" ("Figure" lines 10-12). The urgency in the passage of the "firetruck" (which is a piece of equipment, with all of the attendant structures of meaning, in the Heideggerian sense) suggests that is in use as equipment for a specific task in an engaged, workmanlike manner. For the operators of the truck, then, it is a piece of ready-to-hand equipment. This is not true of the poem's narrator, however, as he observes the number five on the side of the truck. Written signifiers, for Heidegger, are pieces of equipment because they participate in a network of relationships which allow humans to relate to them: They exist in order to accomplish something, are directed towards a goal, and are composed of something (in this case, gold shaped to look like a numeric glyph) (Heidegger 97, 99-100). However, the Great Figure mentioned in the title of the poem -- the number five -- is completely divorced from all denotative meaning; it is reduced merely to a decorative metal blob on the side of an automobile, a thing that the narrator merely observes on a truck that he asserts is itself "unheeded" ("Figure" 9). The narrator relates to the figure, not as a useful thing that exists for the sake of accomplishing a specific task, but merely as an object which exists in the derivative mode which Heidegger terms "present-at-hand" (Heidegger 68). The central effect of this divorcing of a piece of equipment from its normal use is a kind of alienation from what the tool is intended to do -- in this case, to signify a quantity -- and what it actually manages to do -- that is, decorate the side of a speeding fire truck.
Although this same derivative relation to objects is not as immediately obvious in "The Red Wheelbarrow," an examination of the assertion of the poem shows that this relation is even more clearly demonstrated here. The central assertion of this poem, that
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow ("Wheelbarrow" lines 1-4)
shows that the narrator here, as well, is intellectually contemplating the role of a tool, rather than directly using it. A wheelbarrow is clearly a piece of equipment in the Heideggerian sense because it participates in the above-mentioned network of meaningful relationships, and although the narrator realizes that "much depends" (1) on this wheelbarrow, this fact is considered from a theoretical distance and does not constitute a basic relationship between the piece of equipment and someone directly engaging him- or herself with it. Heidegger might almost have had this type of detached contemplation in mind when he wrote:
No matter how sharply we just look [Nur-noch-hinsehen] at the 'outward appearance' ["Aussehen"] of Things in whatever form this takes, we cannot discover anything ready-to-hand. If we look at Things just 'theoretically', we can get along without understanding readiness-to-hand. But when we deal with them by using them and manipulating them, this activity is not a blind one; it has its own kind of sight, by which our manipulation is guided and from which it acquires its specific Thingly character. (98)
The object's materiality in these Williams poems, then, obtrudes itself upon the narrator's consciousness because he fails to relate to it in the most "primordial" manner of readiness-to-hand, the manner of relation inherent in tool usage. Instead, the narrator contemplates it theoretically, as something that happens to exist "out there" in the surrounding environment. This removal of the wheelbarrow from the normal network of meaning and relevance in order to contemplate those very relations alienates the narrator from the object as he contemplates it, and it is the act of contemplation, rather than engaged use, that performs this act of fundamental separation. The lack of specific detail about the person thinking (the poem describes a thought process that could belong to almost anyone who speaks English and uses a wheelbarrow) leaves the poem almost entirely without a narrator, as a disembodied thought speaking a general revelation.
Eliot's narrator in "Preludes" also shares many of these characteristics, especially at first: There is no specific detail about the narrator until the end of the poem, for instance. (Until the last seven lines of the poem, all of the personal pronouns are second- or third-person.) This gives the impression of a generalized observer right up until the last half of the last section. As with the narrators of the Williams poems discussed above, the narrator of "Preludes" has a primarily detached manner of relating to objects: he observes the passing of time and catalogs events that occur, objects that he perceives, and thoughts that he has.
Although many of the objects the narrator mentions are pieces of equipment in the Heideggerian sense, the narrator fails to engage any of these items in an engaged, purposeful manner. He does, however, observe others doing so: It is someone else's fingers that stuff the pipes of line 43, it is someone else who lights the lamps of line 13, and it is someone else's hands "[that] are raising dingy shades/ In a thousand furnished rooms" in lines 22-3. The narrator's relation to the objects described in the poem seems to be one in which he merely perceives things and reflects upon them without engaging with them as useful pieces of equipment. When the first and only personal "I" of the poem occurs in line 48, the narrator obtrudes on the reader's consciousness to point out that his primary relation to the objects in the poem is through "images" and the intellectual content ("fancies" and a "notion") that is "curled/ Around" them. (Eliot lines 48-50) The narrator is "moved" by his perception and reflection upon the objects treated in them poem, and seems therefore more involved with these objects than are the narrators in the Williams poems considered above. This relationship to the poetic objects, though, is still far distant from Heidegger's "ready to hand" mode of engagement with a useful tool (48-9).
Both Williams and Eliot, then, relate to objects in such a way that they are seen in the manner that Heidegger describes as "present-at-hand," rather than the more primordial "ready-to-hand" manner upon which the derivative mode of presence-at-hand is based. Still, in each case, the narrator seems to be straining toward Heidegger's more primordial mode of relating to objects. In "The Red Wheelbarrow," for example, the narrator is aware that "so much depends/ upon" the object of the poem's concern ("Wheelbarrow" 1-2), which demonstrates an awareness of the set of relationships by which a person can relate to a thing in a ready-to-hand manner. In Eliot's "Preludes," the narrator is "moved" by the fancies that "are curled/ Around" the images he sees ("Preludes" 48-9). The specific word "moved" demonstrates that the images have a significance for the narrator; significance, for Heidegger, is rooted in the totality of all of the relationships that allow a piece of equipment to exist as a ready-to-hand object (Heidegger 120).
This tense relationship towards objects, in which the narrator is aware of the structure of their ready-to-hand character but does not relate to them in this manner, is the formal definition of anxiety for Heidegger. In anxiety, a person can see the manner in which things relate to one another, but is not involved in these meaningful, significant relationships: "Here the totality of involvements," he writes, "[...] is of no consequence" (231). Moreover, Heidegger makes it clear that anxiety is a condition fundamentally related to theoretical contemplation:
It is not the case, say, that the world first gets thought of by deliberating about it, just by itself, without regard for the entities within-the-world, and that, in the face of this world, anxiety then arises; what is rather the case is that world as world is discosed first and foremost by anxiety, as a mode of state-of-mind. (232)
It is this failure to deal with the objects of poetic concern in the ready-to-hand relational manner that is the origin of the narrative anxiety in these modernist poems. This is also the reason why the objects seem to have unusually detached, independent characters: They seem usually separate because the narrators' insistence on dealing with them as merely present objects constructs them as detached, merely present objects. This relational mode treats the objects as things-in-themselves, rather than pieces of useful equipment that take their being as specific kinds of things from the network of meaningful relationships. The language of these inquiries is structured around a concept of the object of poetic concern as a thing in itself, and this conception of the object necessarily communicates itself a manner associated with -- in fact, infused by -- anxiety.
References
Dreyfus, Hubert L. Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.
Eliot, T. S. "Preludes" from The Wasteland and Other Poems. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1934.
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1962.
Williams, William Carlos. "The Great Figure." Imagist Poetry: An Anthology. Ed. Bob Blaisdell. Mineola, New York: Dover, 1999. 146.
Williams, William Carlos. "The Red Wheelbarrow." The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Fifth Edition. Eds. Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy. New York: Norton, 2005. 1274.
Notes
[1] Heidegger uses the verb "to exist" (and its derivative formations) in a specific terminological sense in which I avoid employing these words, because a discussion of this specific terminological sense is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I use the word "exist" in its everyday, common sense.
[2] Again, Heidegger does not use the phrase "human being"; his specific term is the German word Dasein, which literally means "being-here" or "being-there" and is used in everyday German to denote the manner in which human beings exist. Although a discussion of exactly what Heidegger means by Dasein is also beyond the scope of this discussion, it is not inappropriate for this analysis to say that he very roughly means "human" or "human being" by Dasein. Heidegger provides a basic introduction to the meanings of this concept in the first four sections of Being and Time (21-35); Dreyfus also does so, somewhat more concisely, in pages 12 through 16 of his Being-in-the-World.
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