Identity, Nonhuman Sentience, and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Abstract

Ecocritical disciplines have already established that the nonhuman around neither requires human patronage nor the so-called anthropocentric civilizing tools to assert its sovereignty and non-contingent character. Much prior to any such discursive finding, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land testified to it through poetic and philosophical exploration. Germane to our present analysis will be what William Cronon postulates in his article “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting back to the Wrong Nature”: “[It is] crucial for us to recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons for being as it is” (69). Since in the contemporary ecocritical parlance, anti-anthropocene is a valid modality of cognition, this paper seeks to examine the nuanced underpinnings of nonhuman sentience and identity with reference to T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. In fact, the more one explores the interests of the nonhuman, the more unpredictable the human values become. Eliot’s figures (both human and nonhuman) make complete sense only if one necessarily reckons the “waste and void” (Jain 110) of the wasteland as a vast reservoir of nonhuman sentience.