The Eventfulness of Non-Events in Modernist Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.”

Abstract

Abstract Although lyric poetry is not a narrative genre in the strict sense, poems do employ narrative elements extensively. Due to the temporal condition of human existence, the temporality of living, acting and communicating, the sequence of the utterance in poems follows a temporal organization, consisting of changes of state. The lyric text can thus be conceived of as the hybrid interaction of narrative and poetic structures. Genre-specifically, narrative elements in poems tend to occur in covert or condensed forms, typically in the mental sphere. Since a narrative in order to be “tellable” requires a decisive, “eventful” turn, poems, too, tend to feature some kind of event, which constitutes their central “point”: some surprising shift in their sequential structure. Although the normal case of an event is a decisive change of state, there are also interesting examples where the non-occurrence of an (expected) event counts as eventful constituting the tellability of the story. That applies not only to narratives in fiction and drama (such as Beckett’s Waiting for Godot) but also to lyric poetry. ‒ After expounding the transgeneric application of concepts of narrativity and eventfulness to lyric poetry this article analyzes in detail two eminent modernist poems as significant cases where the non-occurrence of an eventful change constitutes an event in its own right (and thereby the point of the text): T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen B. B.” (“Of poor B.B.”). The two poems are shown to differ significantly with respect to meaning and function of eventful uneventfulness: The absence of decisive changes is presented in The Waste Land as a deplorable failure of traditional values and forms of vital regeneration but in “Of poor B. B.” as a provocative rejection of conventional concepts and expectations.