The Dark Adam of Modernity: in The Waste Land

The book reveals the links between the 'young man carbuncular' as
the typist's romancer, the carbuncle eyes of Satan in Paradise Lost,
and the sacred carbuncle gem in the Church of Magnus Martyr,
where the gem is worn by the high priest Aaron in a portrait. Christianity
linked the gem with Christ, so that the gem is said to throw
light into the darkness. That darkness is brought to the poem as
the young man carbuncular visits the typist at the 'violet hour' of
dusk, in the way Milton's Satan malevolently stalks Eve in Eden.
The clerk embodies a scribal lineage back to the Old Testament and
the moment scribes created the seditious Eve, a mythology Eliot
thought better 'left in the Book of Genesis'. In modernity, the typist
contends with both that Old Testament legacy and the misogyny
of the preeminent modern philosopher of male egoism, Friedrich
Nietzsche. To the extent that the pustular clerk represents the egoist
thought systems of modernity as the termini of millennia of such
scribal Adamic vainglory, he becomes the dark Adam of modernity
who assaults the typist as Eve, and as all women.

Table of Contents:

Characters, Places and Themes xiii
Introduction
1. Context: London, Europe and New York
The Genesis of New Worlds
A Panorama of Anarchy: The New York Times of 1921
The turmoil of the post-war world
Behold the Man: The Typist's Romantic Partner
Friedrich Nietzsche's overman as the Adam of the future
The Bold Stare and the Setting Sun
The egoist confidence of the pustular clerk
2. The Visual Language of the Church of Magnus Martyr
The Altarpiece
The High Priest Aaron Wearing the Carbuncle Gem
The Violet Hour: Violet Covers at Easter
The Altarpiece of St. Stephan's Walbrook
3. The Carbuncle Gem in Magnus Martyr
The Carbuncle Gem in Literature and Christianity
The gem, the clerk, and the glowing eyes of Satan
Skin for Skin
Hezekiah's boil, St. Augustine's sores of the soul, and the Satanic affliction of Job
The Adam and Eve of Miles Coverdale
The proto-Puritan Adam in Magnus Martyr
The English Civil War and Paradise Lost
Reformation creeds, and ongoing civil war
The White and Gold of the Temple of Solomon
The colours of the altarpiece and the First Temple
David, Solomon, and Hezekiah the Destroyer of Shrines
The mythic power of the Temple of Solomon
4. Pandemonium: The City, the Bridge, and the Stairs
Babel, Pandemonium, and Londinium
All roads lead to Rome
London Bridge, Londinium Bridge and the Bridge from Hell
Satan's bridge to the upper world of London in 1922
The Foul Descent of Heaven's Antagonist
The stairs to Heaven and Hell and the descent of the clerk
5. Satan
The Carbuncle Eyes of Satan
Milton's Satan and Eliot's young man carbuncular
The Satanic Hero: The 'Curly-haired Byronic Hero of Milton'
The Romantic anti-hero from Milton's Satan to Byron
The Tyrant: Coleridge's Satan
Milton's Satan as template for the tyrant
Baudelaire's Satan
The Satanism of Charles Baudelaire as dark spirituality
The Boils of Mephistopheles
The German Romantic rescued from Mephistopheles
6. Broken Images: The Battle of Creeds in Magnus Martyr
The Church
A glimpse of the history of England
The Murdered Churches of London
The threat to demolish Magnus Martyr
Breaking Imagery to Pieces: Milton's Eikonoklastes
The English Reformation and the destruction of imagery
Puritanism
Zealotry in religious and secular creeds
The Via Media
The middle way
A Pompous Poem, or a Ulysses in a Walnut Shell?
Two versions of T.S. Eliot, and of The Waste Land
Epilogue:
An intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time

About the Author :
W.K. Brannigan. William Kieran Brannigan (Biil) lives and works in London. BA in English Lit. from Birkbeck, University of London (1998) and an MAR (Master of Arts by Research) on T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land from Durham University (2020).

Review :

Undertakes a kind of critical detective work that compellingly
and convincingly illuminates key aspects of the poem ... it weaves
a very meticulous and perceptive reading of the physical space of
the church into the analysis of key touchstones in the poetry ...
one of the motivating ideas in the thesis is anarchy, which is seen
in both political and poetic guises ... the thesis gives considerable
weight to the 'structural anarchy' of The Waste Land as it surveys the
poem's recurring patterns of destruction and rebuilding. The later
parts move towards a demonstration of how the clerk serves as a
modern manifestation of extreme individualism, of the 'inner voice'
engendered by the Protestant Reformation, and of the Nietzschean
ubermensch ... This is an excellent piece of scholarship: lively, subtle,
illuminating and rigorous.
Prof Stephen Regan (Durham), Dr Aaron Kelly (Edinburgh)