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Standard interpretation of The Waste Land holds that the people of the land fear biological life because it is symbolically a reminder of the need for a spiritual life. Although they want a spiritual life, they do not believe in it, and thus are tortured by conflict. This interpretation has worked well; but I wish to modify it by suggesting that the core fear of Eliot's people is fear of death. Fear of life and of death are, indeed, closely connected.1
Eliot's characters refuse to confront death realistically. I will deal with a few of these ways and will concentrate on one: the reduction of being, of humanness, to a compromise condition in which life and death are forced into a stasis of powerlessness. Reductive compromise may form the middle ground condition of sensation, as opposed to feeling. It may be a condition of sensory confusion of warmth and coldness, of wetness and dryness. It may be a confusion of madness and sanity. This compromise may also link the living and the dead, the human, the non-human, and the sub-human, into a single reductive image of dehumanization. All of these compromise diminutions of life and death have to do with the attentuation of, the numbing of the fear of death—and of life.
I would like first to discuss the relationship between death fear and violence. Many twentieth-century thinkers believe that death fear is the core human fear, that it is repressed and projected in various disguises, and that it is the primary cause of scapegoat violence. The purpose of this violence is to reduce death fear. To be fully human, according to Kierkegaard, is to be fully open to the reality of death.2 Of the specific forms of violence in The Waste