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226 LITERATÛRZINÂTNE, FOLKLORISTIKA, MÂKSLA
You can not really understand the ardour with which Eliot repudiates interpretation
and personality apart from the fact that Eliot involves himself in a contradictory
strategy since he is himself offering a roughly Freudian interpretation of Hamlet the
character as well as of Hamlet the play and Shakespeare, its author. And in these
manoeuvres in obscure ways he is mirroring himself.
*
Anti–expressivism and anti–interpretationalism thus merge in a repressive movement
in some of Eliot’s critical writing as well as in some of his poetry. Of course
Eliot is repressing sexuality, but is he therein also repressing the female? Rose argues
that the concept of the ‘objective correlative’ [...] was originally [...] a reproach
against the character of a woman. The woman in question is Gertrude .... [who] is not
good enough aesthetically, that is, bad enough psychologically, which means that in
relationship to the affect which she generates by her behaviour in the chief character
of the drama – Hamlet himself – Gertrude is not deemed a sufficient cause. 21
Rose like Spurr sees the notion of an objective correlative as the upholding of
decorum. To this analysis she adds the notion of the “difference”, what cannot be
understood or expressed, as “femininity”. Eliot’s diagnosis of Hamlet as the Mona
Lisa of literature is taken to reveal that to Eliot the feminine is the archetype of the
enigmatic. Rose’s analysis is certainly pertinent to the deeper layers in “Hamlet and
his Problems”. Still her focusing on gender issues can be better understood within a
wider context. The fear of or repudiation of women is part of a cluster of antagonisms:
the savage, the (working class) mob, the stranger, or the immigrant. These fears
in the urban jungle of The Waste Land are highlighted in Joseph Mc Laughlin’s The
Urban Jungle. Reading Empire in London from Doyle to Eliot (2000). The corresponding
obsession with the question of eugenics in its literal and metaphoric modes
is studied by Donald J. Childs in Modernism and Eugenics. Woolf, Yeats, and the
Culture of Degeneration (2001).
But it must also be emphasised that these are no clear cut antagonisms. In a
fascinating study, Modernism and Mass Politics (1995), Michael Tratner convincingly
argues that Eliot along with co–modernists held an ambivalent attitude towards the
mob, women, and savages. Often these agents merge: the mob is often given female
characteristics or identified with woman. But Eliot also wants to identify with his own
“mob part of the mind”. 22 Modernist difficulty has often been seen as an expression
of elitist arrogance, of the modernist in the ivory tower, but Tratner sees modernist
difficulty as expressive of a will to represent and identify with the mob. Culture could
offer something to both the mob and the intellectuals: what Eliot called “myth.” He
saw, for example, Communism and Catholicism both possessing these ingredients:
“The great merit of Communism is the same as the one merit of the
Catholic church, that there is something in which minds at every level
can grasp.... Communism has what is now called a ‘myth’” [...] The
Waste Land is a poem aimed at producing a myth ... Eliot’s focus in The
Waste Land was consequently on transforming leadership. The poem is
a critique of high culture for having lost touch with the mob and the mob
part of the mind – having lost touch with the roots of culture. 23