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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Tiresian Poetics: Modernism, Sexuality, Voice, 1888-2001
ISBN# 9780838639375
Reviewed by: Patrick Query, West Point
Spring 2011 Newsletter of the T.S. Eliot Society |
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In the Myth of Tyresias, the famous seer strikes with a stick at two mating snakes, presumably separating them, "sorting them out," as the British say. In Tyresian Poetics, Ed Madden takes up the discourses of gender and sexuality that have come to the fore of Eliot studies and, instead of sorting them out, coaxes them into new and ever more provocative patterns. Reading the figure of Tiresias in The Waste Land as comprehensively as he does would itself be enough to justify Madden's study, but he performs the same feat with the work of "Michael Field" (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), Djuna Barnes's Nightwood, Austin Clarke's Tiresias, and even a number of "late twentieth-century versions of the Tiresias myth." "There is something very queer about Tiresias," Madden begins, before going on to ask, "to what ends has the figure of Tiresias been deployed" over the long twentieth century? It is a wonderfully resonant question, and Madden's answer is as rich and thought-provoking as one could desire.
Madden's focus is so sharp that it allows him to perform remarkably through readings of his key texts -- The Waste Land foremost among them. Virtually nowhere does his argument fail to outpace potential quibbles or objections, so exhaustive is its work of textual -- and sometimes -- contextual -- examination. It is an argument that leaves no stone unturned.
Besides having found a timely and important area of investigation, perhaps the book's greatest asset is the credibility it establishes for its claims. Over 100 of the book's 400 pages are given to notes and bibliography: one always has the clear sense of the author's command not only of his primary material but of virtually every meaningful layer of the critical discourse surrounding it.
Tiresian Poetics is an impressive and important book. Reading it is not easy going, but neither is the work of making sense of the resolutely intertwined snakes of gender and sexuality in The Waste Land, or of characterizing the body of twentieth-century literature that gradually established a poetics under the Tiresian sign. That is Madden's work, and it is hard to imagine anyone outdoing it soon.
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