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California State University, Dominguez Hills
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Created: April 29, 2001
Latest update: April 29, 2001
jeannecurran@habermas.org

I won't get back to this before tomorrow afternoon, but I wanted to alert you to some of the exciting material in Writing the Urban Jungle, by Joseph McLaughlin, University Press of Virginia, 2000. ISBN 0-8139-1972-X (pbk.)

I picked this book up in Reno, mostly for me, because it deals with the literature of Victorian England. When I got home and started to read, though, I realized what wonderful stories it has to help you understand empire, colonialism, and postcolonialism.

For example, there are some wonderful passages on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I read the Waste Land in high school and college, as I suppose all of us have. But I've rarely thought of it since, and was totally unprepared for McLaughlin's treatment of the famous poem. Imagine my surprise when McLaughlin admitted how little he understood of the poem when he first read it. I thought it was just me. So I want to share this with you in case you had the same experience with "great literature" and I want you to see how much knowledge comes from always searching into the strange nooks and crannies of academic bookcases.

McLaughlin's Chapter 7, "What Are the Roots of that Clutch?" tells of two great influences on T.S. Eliot: his immigration as a well-educated young man to London from St. Louis, Missouri and his career as an international banker. Eliot pasted news together from many foreign newspapers for his bank's foreign department. And he did so, not in the sense of making a single coherent story of the news, but of presenting a kaleidoscope of events. This is the same style he used in writing the Waste Land. So the bank and his work there nurtured his work in poetry.

He originally came to London to escape the urban jungle of the industrialization in the U.S. He sought an earlier time, a purer tradition he ascribed to the ideal London. But of course, London was a microcosm of the empire, at least the East End was. Eliot could have his urban jungle, pasting bits of it together at will, and make it into a world poem, which is what McLaughlin says we find in the Waste Land. McLaughlin emphasizes the role that Eliot saw in his own power to collocate images of the urban jungle, to present them as "facts," as "evidence," and to thus purify them. McLaughlin points out the extent to which Eliot failed to understand the degree to which in the very collection of those "facts" he imposed upon that urban jungle his own perspective, his own privileging of the white empire.

More soon. . . I have the book, if some of you want to look at it more closely. jeanne

jeanne's notes added on Tuesday, May 1, 2001:

Valencia, consider religion as one aspect of the "Urban Jungle." I'll bet Jaime Shephard has a lot to contribute to this. Also, why not ask Prof. O.W. Wilson to contribute?