Literature review: TS Eliot / The Waste Land, Abbey Theatre, Dublin

Paul Muldoon takes it for granted that a poet’s words speak for him, rather than just the other way round. No allusions are accidental, all possible echoes are to be considered. To use a contemporary metaphor, the poem, for Muldoon, is a hypertext, each word a potential link or jumping off point for his playful erudition.

For the inaugural TS Eliot Lecture at the Abbey Theatre, Muldoon puts his method to work on Eliot’s dense 1920 poem ‘Whispers of Immortality’. In Muldoon’s hands it is a poem emanating from the pain of Eliot’s troubled marriage and haunted by Bertrand Russell’s affair with his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood Eliot.

Muldoon does not pause to consider if sometimes, as Beckett said, there are no symbols where none intended. But it’s rewarding to witness such a creative intelligence as Muldoon’s at play. It’s a method of subconscious excavation of which Eliot himself approved. The poet, Eliot said, “does not know what he has to say until he has said it.”

Fiona Shaw’s subsequent performance of ‘The Waste Land’ is a tour de force of control, timing, wit and range. In her hands, the poem is a lively, peopled place. Her Countess Marie is a surprisingly flighty type, Shaw delivering her reminiscences in the manner of a wait-till-I-tell-you gossip. Her bunged-up Madame Sosostris is a little comic gem.

When the speaker in The Game of Chess says “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. Speak to me. Why do you never speak?”, we hear a frantic person and think, thanks perhaps to Muldoon, only of Eliot’s wife. And so we go, until Eliot’s closing, repeated “Shantih”. In his “feeble translation” of the Upanishads, Eliot defines the word as “the peace which passeth understanding”. Is this some small hope to end The Waste Land’s’ fragmentary depiction of a broken civilisation? Shaw underplays it, wisely, to leave us uncertain.