“These fragments have I shored against my ruins.” With this plaintive line, T.S. Eliot brings his great poem, The Waste Land, toward its conclusion. Published in 1922, The Waste Land is a strange, tragic and moving poem, a monument of Modernist poetry in its heyday between the World Wars. Europe’s optimism had been shattered in the trenches of World War I, and new articulate voices arose in its wake to proclaim the sad truths of human finitude, moral fragmentation and death.
Although some people now say that we are in the Postmodern period, I think that our literature, art and science are still very much in the Modernist mode, still working on the problems and possibilities that were envisioned by the great Modernists, including Eliot, Kafka, Picasso and Einstein.1 These men of genius created new ways of understanding the world, after many of the old solid rules had crumbled in the shockwaves of a senseless and massively destructive war.
The rise of a new literary and intellectual canon after a catastrophic war that undermines the foundations of the old order is a recurring pattern in human affairs. A time of questioning, suffering and despair creates the potential and need for new forms of understanding. A time of stability does not require us to reach so deeply: It lets us remain in our well-worn and pleasant paths. In the case of Modernism, a new canon is born of suffering and loss.
The canon of the Hebrew Bible was similarly born of suffering and loss, a child of cultural catastrophe. While other factors—including sheer literary power—are important conditions for the inclusion of certain books in the biblical canon (as recently and persuasively argued in Robert Alter’s book, Canon and Creativity),2 the context of cultural loss is the immediate backdrop to the birth of the biblical canon.
The classic scene that represents the birth of the canon is Ezra’s first reading of the Torah in Nehemiah 8. The great era of the kings and prophets is long past, and the Mosaic era a fading memory, when Ezra, the able priest and scribe, returns to Jerusalem with “the book of the Law (Torah) of Moses” in hand. At this point, the returnees from the Babylonian Exile have been scraping and scrabbling to restore Jerusalem to something approximating its former glory, but they have fallen far short. The people are divided among themselves, and the newly restored Second Temple is a poor simulacrum of Solomon’s Temple. The destructive force of the Babylonian conquest and Exile have created deep ruptures in the foundations of Israelite religion. Ezra seeks to repair them by reading from a book.
As Ezra reads, the people weep. According to Nehemiah 8:9, “All the people were weeping as they heard the words of the Torah.” They are so moved and saddened by the narration of their glorious past that they must be commanded, “Do not mourn, and do not weep” (Nehemiah 8:9). What is gone is gone, but there is now something new—a book that somehow contains the glory of the past, and a new technique of understanding the world through reading and hearing the words of the book. Their loss and suffering are transformed into another deep emotion: “They rejoiced greatly, for they understood the words that had been declared to them” (Nehemiah 8:12).
In this scene, the past is re-created in a book, which is narrated and explained to the people. A new canon is born out of a background of catastrophe and loss, and it offers the people a way out of the ruins. I should add that it doesn’t much matter whether this event happened in precisely the way it is told, for this too is the magic of the canon—it renews the past in a way that can be communicated and understood, in joy and resolution.
“These fragments have I shored against my ruins.” With this plaintive line, T.S. Eliot brings his great poem, The Waste Land, toward its conclusion. Published in 1922, The Waste Land is a strange, tragic and moving poem, a monument of Modernist poetry in its heyday between the World Wars. Europe’s optimism had been shattered in the trenches of World War I, and new articulate voices arose in its wake to proclaim the sad truths of human finitude, moral fragmentation and death. Although some people now say that we are in the Postmodern period, I think that our literature, art […]
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Einstein’s theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and became widely known after it was experimentally confirmed in November 1919, shortly after World War I. Einsteinian relativity—and the development of quantum mechanics—are very much Modernist theories in their implications, even though scientifically true.
2.
Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven/London: Yale Univ. Press, 2000).
