In a Flash of Lightning: Conversion and the Non-Object Through Kierkegaard and Eliot

Abstract

In both T.S Eliot’s poetry and the writings of Søren Kierkegaard, conversion serves as an escape from the noise and din of social life. Similarly, both writers implicitly respond to Hegelian Absolute Idealism’s placement of poetry and religious practice within “picture-thinking,” outside of real knowledge. Conversion appears in both thinkers as a response to the pressures of social life, and as a breakdown in communication between religious adherents and their society. Kierkegaard especially articulates the impossible space of Christians within “Christendom.” This paper takes as its point of comparison Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reading it through a lens from Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works. First, I work through the development of anxiety as a social phenomenon in both, before turning to Eliot and Kierkegaard’s depiction of the conversion event as self-obliterative. I then explore the silence after conversion, with a particular interest in the cessation of metaphysical speculation.

1. Introduction

The “non-object” is poetry’s problem. The ungraspable or ineffable object has been a topic for English-language poetry since at least Bede’s Death Song, but is by its nature resistant to representation. Poets are put into a position of attempting to say the unsayable or describe an object without describable qualities. This is true especially of the Metaphysical poets and their inheritors, who approached philosophical questions directly through the medium of poetry. Authors such as John Donne and George Herbert addressed ineffable concerns such as the afterlife with philosophical sensitivity.

In Hegel, however, this dimension of poetry is challenged. Not only does The Phenomenology of Spirit deem poetry a form of “picture-thinking” (Vorstellung), and so deem the poets incapable of describing concepts, he further gives a definition of the absolute, which can be taken to disqualify the ineffable as something poetic reasoning can access. Poetry, as Robert Pippin has put it, simply “collapses into” philosophy, deflated by its own inability to fully grasp existence (c.f. Pippin 2011, pp. 102–20; Wilson 2016). Of course, poetry claims an ineffability to its images; such ideas are ineffable only because poetry cannot logically elaborate the relevant concept. This is why Hegel places the arts, including drama and lyric, into his discussion of Religion in his Phenomenology (Hegel 1977, pp. 424–53). They are a step immediately prior to the arrival of the ineffable on Earth in the incarnation and so are simply outmoded (a theme Hegel also elaborates in his Aesthetics) (Harries 1974; Geiger 2011; Bowie 2003, pp. 140–82).

The project of a post-Hegelian account of the ineffable thus came to be intimately tied in certain cases to the project of a philosophical poetry. Both are tied to a defense of unmediated, “sense-certain” immediate experience. If such a form of phenomenal experience is valid without having to be conceptually mediated, then so is the poetry which results from it. This theme is taken up in the famous cases of Søren Kierkegaard and T.S Eliot, one a poetic philosopher and one a philosophical poet, who each dramatize the struggle of a modern subjectivity to encounter and describe the divine. Both were intimately acquainted with Hegelian philosophy (Kierkegaard via his encounters with Schelling and Danish Hegelians such as Hans Martensen; Eliot through his study of F.H Bradley), and both sought a role for poetic expression in describing what Kierkegaard called faith’s “immediacy.” (c.f. Schreiber 2010, pp. 391–425).

In what follows, I will draw out the affinities between the two authors, using Kierkegaard to elucidate what several commentators have called Eliot’s “anxiety.” Reading the anxiousness as Kierkegaard’s “anxiety of sin” enables a transformative reading of “The Waste Land” as an existential–phenomenological text on theological topics. The first part of the essay will read Eliot’s poem in relation to several key texts and concepts from Kierkegaard’s philosophical corpus. I will then turn to a more directly comparative reflection of Kierkegaard’s account of the Abraham story with the implied conversion narrative in the concluding sections of “The Waste Land,” elucidating shared elements of each account. In both, the achievement of the second birth in faith is simultaneously beyond the power of language to describe but can be pointed toward or suggested; in Eliot in particular, this comes via the deployment of certain worshipful, self-limiting poetic forms. By reading the English-language modernist poem in conversation with Kierkegaard’s Danish romantic philosophy, we can gain a better grasp of the encounter between the written word and the unwritable experience.

2. Objecthood and City-Life

“The Waste Land” quotes “many voices.” (Carver 2007). These voices are the collected spoken dialogue of the city of London, where Eliot was living in his eighth year as an expatriate. He depicts the city itself as anxious; Beci Carver has written,

To live in London was both to witness the wasting away of his literary and material aspirations—or so it seemed—and to experience that ‘wasting’ as a tax on his vital energies. He seemed to waste his time at an obscure cost to himself, and the result is an anxiety that ‘shatters’ his poem.1

London becomes a dynamic, moving force. Just as the narrator passing from voice to cacophonic voice, the setting moves without a single structure, traveling through London with consistent reference to external locations—such as Marie’s memories of the Starnberger See in the opening stanza (Eliot 2020, Lines 8–18). The city location, while central to the poem’s function, is deformed by the narrator’s running thoughts, while Eliot appears to associate rural and natural scenes, such as the mountains, with freedom (Goodspeed-Chadwick 2009, pp. 383–84; Eliot 2020, Lines 17–18). Carver attributes this amorphousness of the poem’s city to Eliot’s struggle against rising rents in the years of its writing, and his anxiety of displacement (Carver 2007). We should note that Eliot himself never deploys the term “anxiety” in the poem—it is a description deployed by his interpreters. The narrator(s) of the poem clearly seem to reflect some sort of nervousness, and the connection between that fear and Eliot’s mental health at the time of the composition is interpretively useful. However, beyond the fear of displacement, Eliot also shows a clear fascination with the language of spiritual emptiness and sinful behavior.2

While Carver and others have pointed to the anxiety or neuroticism of Eliot’s London, they general approach such anxiety as a clinical or psychological diagnosis; Carver, for instance, ties it to Freud’s definition of anxiety as fear of “expectation,” while Dan Pearce identifies it with Harold Bloom’s “anxiety of influence,” a repetition compulsion against Eliot’s French surrealist predecessors (Carver 2007; Pearce 1988). Almukhtar and Saeed have remarked upon Eliot’s anxiety in his pre-“Waste Land” work as being primarily defined by insecurity, particularly in his relationships to women, and Giles Mitchell has invoked the psychological concept of “death fear” to explain the behavior of Eliot’s characters (Almukhtar and Saeed 2024). Outside of academia critic Jonathan MacAloon has referred to the poem as a reflection of Eliot’s “mental health,” (drawing on Eliot’s immediately prior nervous breakdown) (McAloon 2018). And finally, contra-these approaches, Adam Kirsch has rooted the poem’s form in elements of Eliot’s critical writing of the same period, and the “affinity for complexity and difficulty, combined with his longing for order and discipline” he finds there (Kirsch 2020).

What we find then is a more-or-less broad consensus among commentators that some sort of anxious compulsion, mood, or illness informs Eliot’s style, and should be kept in mind when approaching the poem. That said, they do not define this anxiety the same way, nor approach its appearance in the text in a universal manner. Into this lacuna, I suggest drawing upon Kierkegaard as a conceptual resource. It is unclear to what degree Eliot was familiar with Kierkegaard, though members of the Modernist circles he ran in were influenced by Ibsen (particularly James Joyce, who Leonardo Lisi has argued adopted a formal structure ultimately derived from Kierkegaard’s work).3 Certainly, drawing a direct link of influence is impossible.4 However, their shared interest in the spiritual elements of existential torment makes Kierkegaard a useful helpmate for understanding Eliot. Using Kierkegaard’s definition of anxiety as “anxiety of sin,” an inter-subjective occurrence between God, man, and history, allows us to interpret Eliot’s “Waste Land” as a spiritually instructive text which elucidates a particular phenomenology of modern spiritual malaise. This theme first comes into focus upon his paraphrase of Ezekiel at line 20.5

While addressing his correspondent as “son of man,” the same referent by which God addresses the prophet, there is an immediate break from the biblical narrative. While God charges Ezekiel to adopt prophethood, Eliot’s narrator pushes no such call, focusing only upon the violence of the localized world. He refers to the subject’s lack of spiritual ability and makes a series of references to inverted biblical motifs. “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief/And the dry stone no sound of water.” (Eliot 2020, pp. 20–25). This leads directly into a series of German-language quotations from the opening scene of Wagner’s tragedy Tristan und Isolde, further underscoring the spiritual emptiness of Eliot’s modern city; the Wagnerian opera positions love as a spiritual culmination, while Eliot’s narrator is “neither living nor dead…Oed’ und Leer das Meer (Empty and desolate is the sea).” (ibid.). The sea, in Wagner’s opera, is empty and frightening, but it is the place where the redemptive love between Tristan and Isolde begins (Wagner 1938, p. 312). By metaphorically transporting Wagner’s sea to the land of his own London while simultaneously depicting memories of unconsummated love, Eliot shows London as loveless and in need of redemption.

This inversion of canonical works serves to juxtapose Eliot’s own modernity with a prior model of social and literary form. “The Waste Land” defines itself in historical relation to both medieval and more recent sources, as references to Dante, the Fisher King, and Wagner indicate. What has been called the poem’s “open structure,” it’s lack of central unified thematic, is an expression of declining central social narrative; as M.L Rosenthal notes, “its final balance is not really final at all; it is a precarious stay only against breakdown, a set of notes that might easily enough be extended with other groupings of images.” (Rosenthal 1972). The formal structure of “The Waste Land” is constructed by quotations from older texts, rearranging them to draw a contrast between their historical condition, which allowed for either full aesthetic autonomy or for a kind of spiritual wholeness, such as is present in Dante’s love for Beatrice.6 The narrative structure of the poem depicts a shattered subjectivity at the level of form, which is to say: the narration is always reflexively engaged with the structure and historical condition of both the subject and his society, which are depicted sliding into fragmentation.7

Eliot’s theme of historical decay bears similarities to sections of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety. Kierkegaard’s presentation of “Objective” and “Subjective” anxiety depicts the level of sin within the subject and the social world as phenomenologically interdependent—“at every moment, the individual is both himself and the race.” (Kierkegaard 1980, p. 28). Anxiety, as the anxiety of sin, bears for Kierkegaard both historical and phenomenological impacts. We see this in the distinction between Adam’s sin and that of the contemporary individual. Adam’s sin introduces all sin to the world; it “posits” sin as a condition (ibid., p. 32). Individuals experience sin as a pre-condition of existence, which they come to recognize through guilt; prior to guilt, “the spirit in man is dreaming.” (ibid., p. 41). It is sin which makes anxiety possible, as by its presence it enables the freedom of decision. In turn, anxiety conditions the behavior of mankind, and so makes the continuation of the race possible (ibid., pp. 52–53).

As sin enters into the world through Adam, it has ramifications and effects through each generation. Before the individual comes to an awareness of their own sin through the discovery of their freedom, sin exists in the world and in history—this is what Kierkegaard calls “objective anxiety.” (ibid., pp. 57–58). The objective anxiety in the world exists as the world itself is fallen from its place; because of Adam’s fall, the whole world is changed, which the anxious subject discovers when they enter “subjective anxiety” for the first time (ibid., p. 60). This anxiety, the “dizziness of freedom,” renders the subject both aware of their own sin and underneath a collective history, a paradox that Kierkegaard escapes in either the suspension of faith, or the embrace of the spiritually deficient emptiness of bourgeois life.8

Let us return now to “The Waste Land,” through this lens of external and internal notions of anxiety. Consider the poem’s presentation of anxiety in the city as reflective of this conflict between one’s own personhood and that foisted upon us by historical sins. Eliot’s encounter between the anxious subject and the city itself builds as a rise in the fearfulness and negativity of its characters throughout the third section, “The Fire Sermon,” and culminates in the fourth, “Death by Water.” This is reflected in the passivity and violent activities of “The Fire Sermon,” where the Thames becomes the biblical Leman and sexual encounters occur with no passion or even memory, leading to a buildup of anxious disassociation in the poem’s characters (Eliot 2020, pp. 139–70, 215–56; Goodspeed-Chadwick 2009, pp. 383–85; Sicker 1984). Tiresias, the narrative voice of the passage, is intentionally divorced and paralyzed by both possibility and the cumulated sin of history (Eliot 2020, pp. 243–46).

The first such vision is of “white bodies naked on the low damp ground,” ahead of the potential implication of “Sweeney to Mrs. Porter in the Spring.” (Eliot 2020, pp. 193–98). Next, “Mr. Eugenides” invites our narrator to the Cannon Hotel, a location which can be associated with prostitution, before a weekend at “the Metropole,” a then-new luxury resort in Brighton (Roessel 1989, p. 175). This leads directly to Tiresias’ account of the sexual encounter between the Clerk and the Typist, the nadir of the poem’s descent; as both Julia Goodspeed-Chadwick and Philip Sicker have noted, the Typist is identified only with her job—the only woman in the poem to go so-unnamed—and is thematically associated with both Lil, a bourgeois woman depicted in the second section, and Philomel from the first section, both of whom are female victims of mistreatment by men (Sicker 1984; Abdoo 1984). The lower-class typist is otherwise completely undescribed, save for the fact we know that the Clerk uses her for his own satisfaction—Eliot references the Typist’s “indifference,” furthering the theme of anxious disassociation just as the immoral behavior of the poem’s characters reaches a pitch.

The character’s blankness increases with their proximity to the rising pitch of violence in the poem (Mitchell 1986; Scully 2018). As if to underscore the city’s relationship to this cruelty, Eliot then turns to a rapid-fire depiction of London scenes, mentioning Queen Victoria Street, the river, Highbury, Richmond, and Moorgate (Eliot 2020, pp. 257–96). The spatial confusion, with the rambling Tiresias in many places at once, reflects the creeping sense of anxiety, sin, and decadence. The section builds through this tour of London to finally abandon the city, heading first to Margate Sands in Kent, and then to ancient Carthage.9 He then concludes section three by describing “burning, burning” like the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, before alluding to Augustine’s Confessions: “Oh Lord Thou Pluckest Me Out.”10

Section four, “Death by Water,” is 10 lines in its entirety. “Phlebas the Phoenician” floats dead in the water; Eliot references Romans chapter 3, warning that both Gentile and Jew may face the fate of Phlebas.11 The drowned man becomes a stand-in for the Pauline condemnation of works-based theology, and of the need to be made new outside the confines of this world. Notably, Paul ends Romans 3 and begins Romans 4 on the shared point that the Law may only be upheld by faith, while Eliot positions “Death by Water” as an interjection of still water between two images of fire. The still and peaceful drowning of Phlebas is set in direct contrast to the confusions at the end of “The Fire Sermon” and the start of “What the Thunder Said,” in a poem where water has already been established as a site of potential redemption.

The death of Phlebas is a death to the world, paraphrasing Paul. “The Lord pluckest him out,” in the sense that the obliteration of Phlebas’ personality is a moment in the poem representing conversion (Lewis 1978, pp. 83–84). As Kierkegaard notes, repentance does not itself overcome sin but only leads to the attempt to escape it. The disassociation of the Typist, the violence of the Clerk, the resignation of the bourgeois women in “A Game of Chess” and the absorption in memory by the narrator of “Burial of the Dead” are all escape hatches from spiritual pain—“the most effective means of escaping spiritual trial,” Kierkegaard tells us, “is to become spiritless.” (Kierkegaard 1980, pp. 116–77). Phlebas death is the opposite, the movement out through paradox.

Phlebas’ passing of “the stages of his age and youth” accords with the way Kierkegaard discusses “becoming a Christian;” in a final polemic, Kierkegaard makes clear that such requires “being fully a man, what one might call in a physical sense maturity of manhood—in order then to become a Christian by breaking with everything to which one naturally clings. Becoming a Christian presupposes a personal consciousness of sin and of oneself as a sinner.” (Kierkegaard 1968, p. 213). The project of faith takes a lifetime and is only achieved through hard spiritual work; upon its achievement, there is a total reorientation of the self. As Kierkegaard constantly reiterates, there is a level of incommensurability between the religious and non-religious stages of life. Phlebas’ “death by water” can then be read through the Kierkegaardian lens as not only being the conversion event itself, but a depiction of the post-conversion silence.

The “open structure” of “The Waste Land” now appears not only as a presentation of city-life and disorientation, but via implicature as a depiction of the divine encounter. Dead Phlebas’ silence appears as an immersion into something beyond the self, a structure of dependency which cannot be explained in reference to worldly categories. This casts the warning to “Gentile and Jew” in a new light, as it does the “whirlpool” which Phlebas entered. Both become poetic representations of passing beyond the veil, taking language somewhere words cannot go.

The moment of conversion, for Kierkegaard, is both a sublime revelation and a motion of personality. In Fear and Trembling, we see this clearly by his elaboration of “the Knight of Faith,” a figure who makes the “double movement” to end up on his feet again, gaining new ground after losing the old in “resignation.” (Kierkegaard 1983, pp. 27–53; Crocker 1975). The knight of faith, a paragon figure for Kierkegaard, stands in as an allegory for the conversion moment; in the context of Fear and Trembling’s “lyrical dialectic,” the knight’s double movement and steadfastness stand in specifically for Abraham’s decision to first go to Mount Moriah, but then to remain silent regarding it (c.f. Walther 1997). Abraham’s silence, in this context, deals with his reception of a command which no one else can comprehend. The command to kill Isaac, as it is read in Fear and Trembling, presents an epistemological gap between the believer and those who lack the ecstatic spiritual experience of divinity (c.f. Green 1986, 1993).

In both Kierkegaard and Eliot, we find this poetic approach of non-description, or description through allegory, of the ecstatic experience. In Eliot, it is Phlebas’ death; in Kierkegaard, it is the silent Abraham, riding to Moriah without explaining his actions. Notably, both use the image of rock and mountain, and the journey upward. The knife’s edge point in both is the escape from the din (Danish: vriml) of the day-to-day, and the experience of contact with the non-objects of divinity. For both, it seems clear that the experience of a non-object is very real but cannot be discussed. The movement is to leave this world and return, performing Kierkegaard’s “double movement” into eternity and back again:

Most people live completely absorbed in worldly joys and sorrows; they are bench warmers who do not take part in the dance. The knights of infinity are ballet dancers and have elevation. They make the upward movement and come down again, and this, too, is not an unhappy diversion and is not unlovely to see. But every time they come down, they are unable to assume the posture immediately, they waver for a moment, and this wavering shows that they are aliens in the world.

(Kierkegaard 1983, p. 41)

We see this in “The Waste Land,” as we reach the final section: “What the Thunder Said.” Here, Eliot makes explicit the spiritual nature of Phlebas’ passing, noting that “He who was living is now dead/We who were living are now dying/With a little patience,” before recounting in the narrator’s voice that there is an extra spirit walking among his group: “Who is the third who walks always beside you?/When I count, there are only you and I together/But when I look ahead up the white road/There is always another one walking beside you.” (Eliot 2020, pp. 328–30, 360–63).

Eliot presents those who have crossed the line to the non-objective as bearing a consistent identity. It is an incommunicable distance between sides of the veil, and one side cannot speak to the other, but they can be physically present together. This thought would be familiar to the Kierkegaard of 1848, whose Practice in Christianity makes clear the simultaneously physical and non-physical nature of the incarnation. Time, for both Kierkegaard and Eliot, is warped by the non-object’s presence. It is impossible to reconcile the physical and the non-physical (the object and the non-object) in any legible sense. In Kierkegaard, to believe is to share a temporality with the non-object; the experience of Christ renders the historical incarnation into regular time (Stokes 2015, pp. 46–68). However, without direct phenomenal experience of such an incarnation, it cannot be comprehended by the non-believer. This is why the narrator of “What the Thunder Said” struggles to describe what he sees.

3. The Flash of Insight

“What the Thunder Said” bears thematic resonances with the “The Fire Sermon,” especially as both are narratively concerned with the build-up of catastrophic imagery. Note again the recurrent image of torch fire between the ending of 3 and beginning of 5, with the interjection of Phlebas in the water between them. However, the imagery of “What the Thunder Said” is much more invested in mythology, such as the Fisher King and the disappearing and re-appearing ghost of Phlebas; and in the abstract imagery of rock and water, already established as symbols of spiritual thirst and fulfillment. There is water among the rocks, in the form of rain, but it is not enough to drown.

Eliot concludes the poem with a series of references to spiritual chants, not unlike how he concludes his official conversion poem, “Ash Wednesday.” In “The Waste Land” such language is derived from a mixture of children’s songs (London Bridge), Medieval and Latin poetry, and finally the famous “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./Shantih shantih shantih,” the traditional end of an Upanishad (Eliot 2020, pp. 433–34). This invocation of poetic and religious language is the attempt to represent ritually on this side of the veil what is seen beyond; as it cannot be captured in language, Eliot’s Fisher King-narrator sits on “the shore” before the sea, unable to enter it himself or allow it into his London. There are relevant comparisons here to Kierkegaard’s writing, in keeping with the above Kierkegaardian reading of the buildup to conversion. However, these are tempered in the conclusion of the poem, as Eliot seems to carve out an exception for poetry, liturgy, and poetic writing against the full silence of the converted. If they share views on the nature of conversion as an escape from existential anxiety, Eliot does not share Kierkegaard’s pessimism regarding poetic writing or does not take it as far.

Particularly regarding the idea of unsay-ability on the other side of death and conversion, the under-treated Kierkegaard sermon “At a Graveside” comes to mind. In it, he addresses what to do following the death of a Christian; they are unreachable, and the Christian only “recollects” God during their life, not in the grave (Kierkegaard 1993, p. 71). He writes that

…when the poor man, the servant who must use sparingly the few hours of his infrequent time off, goes to visit a grave in order to recollect someone who is dead and also to think about his own death, when someone like that has to make the most of his meager opportunities, the walk out there also becomes a pleasure, the visit out there also becomes a joyful and salutary diversion… We surely do agree that in his noble simplicity such a person beautifully unites contradictions (which, according to the words of the wise, is the ultimate difficulty), that his recollecting is precious to the deceased, is received with joy in heaven, and that his earnestness is just as laudable, just as well-pleasing to God, just as serviceable to him as that of someone who with rare talent used day and night in practicing in his life the earnest thought of death, so that he was halted and halted again in order to renounce vain pursuits, was prompted and prompted again to hasten on the road of the good, now was weaned of being talkative and busy in life in order to learn wisdom in silence

(ibid., p. 77).

If a point unifies Kierkegaard and Eliot, it is the complexity of grasping the non-object in language; it is the fact we cannot speak of what we may have seen, cannot recollect what we know is true. And in such cases, it would seem our rituals, chants and literature are only approximations to communicate and hold together that which lies beyond the veil. We have finally reached the apex point of this essay: the moment of experiencing the non-object, or the passage of the subject beyond language.

It would be entirely possible to conclude here. However, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling hands us yet another wrinkle, by drawing a distinction between the faithful individual and the poet. The “hero” of faith (in Kierkegaard’s example, Abraham), is subject to description by the poet—as faith and the moment of decision are both indescribable, the hero is silent (Kierkegaard 1983, pp. 68–81; See also Danta 2007, pp. 160–77). The task thus falls to poets and philosophers to make the hero legible, a task which Kierkegaard concludes is always-already foolhardy (ibid.).

This becomes clear in the third “problemata” of Fear and Trembling, which questions whether Abraham is required to break his silence by ethical reason. Controversially, Kierkegaard’s answer is yes; ethics does demand Abraham disclose his intent to sacrifice Isaac. However, because Abraham is not acting ethically, but religiously, he operates beyond this rule. Ethics become at this point a “temptation” (Fristelse), rather than a demand. The ethical demand of participating in society, or of voicing acquiescence to social mores, is itself rejected; rather, in swearing allegiance to the religious demands of God and faith, the hero is placed over and above the ethical, to the point that disclosing his calling would place him back within the crowd. Legibility is impossible. This is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s skepticism regarding poetry (seen in Fear and Trembling, The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air, and other works): it cannot fully capture the existential.

The individualism Kierkegaard associates with faith bears a kinship to Eliot’s view of the individual in modernity. Both are poised against the crowd, and that struggle with the mass is simultaneously a struggle of vocalization. We see it in Eliot’s doubling of “London Bridge” imagery between parts 1 and 5: that in “The Burial of the Dead” a crowd “flow(s) over London Bridge,” only for “What the Thunder Said” to work in elements of “London Bridge is falling down” to its final collage. The former references Baudelaire, and the latter seems to be in some ways an undoing of the first, as though by this point the poem is collapsing in upon itself.

Eliot’s “unreal city” hearkens back to Baudelaire’s “Fourmillante cité, cité pleine de rêves,” (from “Les Sept vieillards” in the Tableaux Parisiens). The invocation is not only of the French poet’s phraseology, however, but his content. The narrator of “Les Sept vieillards” (“The Seven Old Men”) is wandering Paris late at night when he inexplicably encounters seven identical old men. The narrator is unnerved by this, and even after retreating to the comfort of his room is left “dancing, dancing, on a monstrous, shoreless sea!” (Baudelaire 1954). The surreal encounter reflects a broader theme of urban alienation in the Tableaux, which Eliot takes and repurposes for his own London. Rather than a specific reference to the horrific sight of the seven identical men, Eliot applies this “unreality” to the urban mass crossing London bridge by foot (c.f. Sharpe 1990).

The narratorial voice in this verse is clearly obsessed with his own separation from the crowd, claiming “I had not thought death had undone so many.” (Eliot 2020, p. 63). The figurative “death” of modern alienation has this mob of individuals staring at their shoes, and “flowing” as an unindividuated river. Notably, among the environmental features they pass is the Church of Saint Mary Woolnoth, whose tolling bell Eliot also describes as “dead.” That this is included with the London bridge scene of crowd-life-as-death indicates an affiliation between the rituals of the church and those of the alienated, working life. Pointedly, the actual conversation which follows the tolling of the bell is one-sided; “Stetson” never replies.

That in the final stanza London Bridge returns as part of the shuffle of “fragments” quoted by the Fisher King is not merely a coincidence but is situated as a call back to the prior section. Eliot situates the “London Bridge” nursery rhyme immediately prior to three fragmented lines in Romance languages, all of which reflect upon an inability to speak: one from Dante’s Purgatorio, one from the unattributed Latin love poem Pervigilium Veneris, and one from Gerard de Nerval’s “El Desdichado.” This redoubles the prior affiliation of the London Bridge with alienation but recasts it as a subject in free-fall. The first section’s narrator is solidly within his alienated self, to the point that he speaks toward another human with no reply. Here the Fisher King is in “ruins,” post-conversion point of “Death by Water.” Much like the opening narrator’s earlier promise to “show you fear in a handful of dust,” the Fisher King’s “Why then Ile fit you” (itself yet another quote, from Thomas Kyd) is a promise to address someone, “(setting) his lands in order” a promise which no longer means advancing forward aesthetically but rather falling back into spiritually relevant quotation—the famous “Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata./Shantih shantih shantih,” an encroachment upon poetic form by liturgy, and the non-object.

The relevant practices threaten to overwhelm the poetic structure, reflecting a struggle between the re-appearing material and quotational themes from earlier in the poem against the newfound spiritual discovery from sections 4 and 5. The poem itself almost seems to break to allow the “heap of broken images,” “fragments” to pile up, ending in the enjambment and spatialized gaps of the final verse (Eliot 2020, pp. 22, 424–33). Both the material and immaterial world appear among the fragments (“London Bridge” alongside the water motif of the fisherman), a collapse of whatever structuring sensibility previously kept these elements of the poem separate. The indentation and subsequent physical gaps between the printed words of the “Shantih shantih shantih” represent a use of language that allows the non-object and power of its encounter to appear in the text: the use of religious language, or liturgical practice.

The non-object is encountered throughout the last sections of “The Waste Land,” but never articulated. It is only implied, primarily through the reference to ritual practices or the afterlife—the form of the poem must bend and break itself open to leave room for the divine. In some ways, this reminds of the Kierkegaard of Fear and Trembling and his ironical-social view of language. Language is always communicative, always belongs to the relations between human beings; however, those human beings are incapable of truly recognizing each other, and so communication is also subject to a gap.12 What Kierkegaard calls the ethical, or the Hegelian Sittlichkeit of mediation that reconciles conflicting worldviews, has no room for the non-object. The encounter with the incommunicable is by its very nature beyond language and so exposes the fundamental distance between the individuals who would communicate it. Rather than a mediation of their relationships with each other, there is only the immediate relation to the absolute non-object itself.

Eliot utilizes such a social view of language but seems to carve out an exception: poetry itself can carry some of the relevant meaning, if only by pointing to liturgy. The “open structure” functions formally as the means by which extra-textual reality can appear in the poem itself, if only by being gestured toward. Our reading of “Waste Land,” influenced to this point by Kierkegaard, must break with him on this final, minor point. Where Kierkegaard is a pessimist regarding language’s ability to communicate the absolute, Eliot’s formal approach reflects a view that re-structured poetry can point toward the experience of the non-object, if nothing else.

4. Conclusions—Language and the Absolute

The conclusion of The Waste Land gives us a muttering subject, one that cannot articulate what it sees but can attempt to gesture toward that indescribable non-object. Similarly, in the structure of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (and his pseudonymous works more broadly) the poet seeks to describe events that he did not experience, a practice Kierkegaard analogizes to the practice of philosophizing over religion. In both cases, when a writer encounters the unsayable—particularly the non-object of phenomenological religion—writing exists primarily as a stopgap, one that the writer utilizes to “point” rather than directly communicate their experience.13 The primary difference between the two authors is over how this appears: in Kierkegaard, it is simply described, while Eliot re-structures his poem to allow the ecstatic elements of the conversion experience to come through. That said, these differences only become apparent via the initial comparison of the two; without Kierkegaard, the alienation from language and demand for a new formal structure may not come to light. To the extent that they do, or have in prior interpreters, it has not successfully been tied to the silence of the divine encounter the way it has here.

In both works, the material world is found wanting and, ultimately, confused. The encounter of the self with the social world is disillusioning, and the result is a turn away from the material. The immaterial, however, is not an object, and so is not a functional referent. It cannot be communicated. The act of conversion is an engagement with the non-object, but due to the non-object’s very nature it cannot be conveyed to the unconverted. In both Kierkegaard and Eliot, we find a lonely subject who writes around what cannot be said outright; and further, we find a skepticism they will ever be understood. We can say once again: the non-object is poetry’s problem. By using Kierkegaard to understand Eliot’s poem, and then Eliot’s poem to push and challenge Kierkegaard’s skepticism of poetry, we both see “The Waste Land” as an exploration of the phenomenology of the spiritual encounter and as a vehicle to explore the describability of the non-object in such poetic production.