Universität Siegen
Seminar: Noble Prize Winners & New World Genre
SoSe 2006

The Present of the Past
Drafts of Memory in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and Toni
Morrison’s “Beloved”

Written by:
Sebastian Polmans

Bachelor of Arts
Literary, Cultural and Media Studies

Contents

1 Introduction ... 3

2 T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” and the past ... 4

2.1 T.S. Eliot towards the aesthetics of memory ... 6
2.2 Rhetoric of memory in “The Waste Land” ... 9
2.3 Does “The Waste Land” correspond with Eliot’s view towards memory? ... 11

3 Toni Morrison, “Beloved” and the past ... 12

3.1 Toni Morrison towards the aesthetics of memory ... 15
3.2 Rhetoric of memory in “Beloved” ... 16
3.3 Does “Beloved” correlate with Morrison’s view towards memory? ... 17

4 Conclusion ... 19

Works Cited ... 20

1 Introduction

In his book about “Tradition” Edward Shils claims, “there are two pasts.” One is the phenomenal past; the past of realism, the past of occurred incidents which builds a sequence of human action until the present is reached.

The other past is the perceived past. As “a much more plastic thing” this form of past is recorded in myths, memory and in literature, which are built up on the encounters and experiences with the occurred incidents.

Sethe, the fictional figure and protagonist in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”, offers a view towards the timelessness and power of memory: “If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place – the picture of it – stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world.” Does that mean that memories live amongst us? Of course many things we remember today have been there long before our generation was born – for example experiences of our ancestors during World War II, or even myth, traditional orals. Nevertheless, its appearances before do change in the mind of the living generation which is referring to it.

Concerning a pedagogical purpose, in his book, Shils claims for a need of tradition as T.S Eliot does in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent”. With a sensitive regard to the past as function and feeder for a modern artist, it becomes obvious that even novelty presupposes what T.S. Eliot calls “historical sense”. In his essay from 1919 Eliot debates about the problem of time and its relation towards the past. In Eliot’s understanding

“[…] the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; […] This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional.”

This term paper has the aim to draw on two different draughts of perceived memory in English Literature – “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot and Toni Morrison’s novel “Beloved” – to prove an eventual reciprocity of past art and literature to itself in Eliot’s poem, and to offer a recital of Toni Morrison’s novel as a meditation of a memory based on “hard facts”, the body of slavery.

Besides the authors’ personal understanding of the past and their personal views on memory some of the sources, fictional as well as factual, Morrison and Eliot refer to in their works should be slightly enlightened. Moreover, this work wants to analyse the visible presence of the past in the form of words, referring to the sense of identity as a result of memory.

Though Morrison’s and Eliot’s draughts of memory differ from each other not only temporal - “The Waste Land” was published in 1923, “Beloved” in 1987 – do comparable techniques or motifs of memory occur?

The formula in Tim Burton’s adaptation of Daniel Wallace’s tall tale “Big Fish” that “you cannot separate the man from the myth […]” underlines a timeless understanding of the past as duality - a physical past or realism, the man, on the one hand and on the other hand a mental past of perception that is institutionalized in the body of language, the myth.

The phenomenal past could therefore be regarded as foundation of any genre of literature. Shils in a way paraphrases T.S. Eliot’s thought of the “historical sense” and mentions also an artistic ideal of depth that one could find as well in Toni Morrison’s description of hard facts in “Beloved”:

“The past of hard facts is a past of unfathomable depths. We can never be finished with discovering what it was and what it is as a result of what it was. The past of hard facts is ineluctable and unchangeable in principle but we are constantly having to change our ideas about those […] hard facts as new ones appear […].”

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