The modern crisis of authority revolves around the recognition that current versions of traditional authority are no longer credible or reliable. Such a dramatic shift in perception cannot be effectively achieved in the confident and flowery writing of La Belle Époque. When Franz Kafka and TS Eliot write about the modern crisis of authority, they communicate this idea through the very structure and nature of their troubling new writing styles. The crisis is, to borrow a Freudian term, sublimated in the very essence of the works; that is, the obvious doubt and insecurity of the content results in an uncertain and insecure writing style. Certainly, both Kafka and Eliot explicitly present a crisis of authority in “The Metamorphosis,” “The Wastelands,” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” Kafka's bellicose Mr. Samsa illustrates the current decadence of authority figures, while Gregor's metamorphosis undermines the authority of the self. Eliot's pseudo-prophets (such as Teiresias, Mrs. Sosostris, and Prufrock himself) present the collapse of truth and wisdom. However, behind these characters, beneath the manifest anguish and crisis of content, lies a stronger stylistic anxiety and a more powerful compositional crisis, which accentuate the anguish of the works. Concretely, Kafka's use of perspective and Eliot's use of structure transform the crisis of authority already present in the texts into a crisis of style, thus sublimating this uncertainty in the very nature of the works. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay Before examining the style of the works of Kafka and Eliot, it is important to first establish the presence of a crisis of authority in these works. Both Kafka and Eliot dramatize this decadence of authority through the denigration of certain achetypic authoritative characters. In Kafka's “Metamorphosis,” Gregor's father, as paterfamilias, embodies the authority of the family; as a uniformed bank messenger he embodies business authority and as an old soldier, the authority of the state. In the first part, Gregor notices "a photograph of [his father] in military service, as a lieutenant, his hand on the sword, a carefree smile on his face, inviting respect for his uniform and his military appearance" (Kafka 101). Note how Kafka specifically refers to the uniform and wearing as icons of respect, that is, authority. In Part 3, "Mr. Samsa's [bank] uniform, which was not brand new to begin with, was beginning to look dirty... and Gregor often spent entire evenings staring at the many greasy stains on the garment...in which the old man slept in extreme discomfort” (123). transformed into dirt and discomfort The ruin of the uniform is a powerful illustration of Mr2E Samsa's decline as an authority figure. In Eliot's "Prufrock" and "The Wasteland", the decline of authority takes place. manifest in the decadence of modern prophets. These apparent authorities turn out to be impostures or deceptions Consider, for example, Madame Sosostris, the tarot reader, a future prophet who "is known to be the wisest woman in Europe" ( Eliot, “The Wasteland,” 43, 45). His predictions, such as “the drowned Phoenician sailor” in line 47 and “death by water” in line 55, come true in Part IV, “The "death by water", while Phlebas the Phoenician sailor drowns. However, this prophetess is a ridiculous imposture: Eliot devalues ​​her with “Madame Sosostris, famousclairvoyant, had a bad cold” (43-44), thus giving her a certain banality that was too earthly. Although his accurate tarot reading establishes him as an authority of truth, it cannot be taken seriously. In "Prufrock", we see a similar rejection of the truth: If a magic lantern projected the nerves in patterns on a screen: Would it have been worth it If one... were to say: "It's not That's not at all what I meant." (“Prufrock,” 7-8). Prufrock, already overwhelmed by the difficulty of communication, imagines a magic screen which, with total precision and thoroughness, would communicate the truth; Yet, he muses, such an absolute truth would always be rejected. Likewise, he wonders, would it have been worth it, after all... To say: "I am Lazarus, I have come back from the dead, Come back and tell you everything, I will tell you everything" If someone... were to say: 'That's not at all what I meant. That's not it at all.' Here the prophecy of life after death, as well as the promised description of such an afterlife, is rejected. In all these examples we see the authority of truth and prophecy not only fallen, but totally rejected, ignored and suppressed. Thus, through such rejection, the crisis of authority is visibly present in the content of Eliot's works. Here it becomes crucial to examine another crisis of authority present in Kafka's story, that of Gregor himself, and the self-alienation from which he suffers. . Simply put, Gregor loses his authority over himself, his body and his mind. The most obvious starting point is Gregor's initial transformation: he loses his human form and becomes a monstrous vermin. No explanation is offered, nor any hope of improvement. Such a strong and terrifying image of self-estrangement highlights Gregor's loss of control quite effectively. As he tries to leave his bed, he is frustrated by "the many little legs that keep flailing in all directions and which he cannot control at all" (Kafka 92). Gregor's inability to control his legs reflects a general loss of authority over his body. Likewise, when he reflexively slams his mandible into his mother's face at the sight of the café, or when he crawls "mindless" on the walls of his room, we see a general loss of authority over his mind. As Gregor's mind and body oscillate between "Gregor the human" and "Gregor the vermin," he experiences a crisis of self and a decline of authority over his own being. As Gregor experiences this estrangement from the body, the reader experiences estrangement. from the narrow point of view of history, and therein lies Kafka's genius. It sublimates Gregor's own crisis of authority into a crisis of perspective, and thus directly transmutes Gregor's anxiety into the reader's anxiety. This crisis of perspective is explained by the fact that almost the entire narrative of “Metamorphosis” is filtered through Gregor's mind and perspective. For example, when Gregor first wakes up, the reader perceives the qualities of the environment in the order in which Gregor views them: His room, an ordinary human room, but a little too small, was quiet between the four familiar walls. Above the table on which a collection of fabric samples was unpacked and spread... hung a photo... [of] a lady, with a fur hat... Gregor's eyes turned towards the window....The last sentence tells the reader that he has been looking through Gregor's eyes for the entire paragraph, and indeed, the language is colored by Gregor's unique situation: someone other than a giant insect would call his room "an ordinary human room"? In addition, the piece has other qualities that itcould have described, like “flower wallpaper”; yet this detail only arrives thirty pages later (119). Furthermore, the reader's perception of the family is limited to the voices Gregor hears through the door in Part Two (109) and the images Gregor sees through the half-open door in Part Three. The reader is, so to speak, imprisoned in Gregor's perspective; his thoughts and senses exclusively form the reader's vessel of perception. Furthermore, as Gregor moves further and further away from himself, the reader begins to feel a similar estrangement from his vessel of perception. The reader begins to see the flaws in this perspective prison and realize how skewed Gregor's perception of reality is. After all, Gregor wakes up like a monstrous vermin and almost immediately begins to worry about the train he's going to miss! Such strange irony instantly draws suspicion from Gregor's point of view. One has to wonder if his sister plays the violin as divinely as he thinks, given the tenants' unfavorable reaction to his music. Likewise, when Gregor addresses the head clerk, he "knows perfectly well that he is the only one who has retained any composure", a very strange remark coming from a giant cockroach. Such bizarre, funny, and disturbing examples serve to distance readers from the only vessel of perception they have, just as Gregor distances himself from the only vessel of perception (his body) he has. Thus, Kafka's use of perspective makes Gregor's crisis of self a crisis for the reader as well. Eliot, similarly, uses the structure of "The Wasteland" to transform the rejection of prophecy into an integral part of the poem's experience. . By masking the poem's many prophetic voices with cacophonies of fragmented voices and language, Eliot hinders the message of the prophets and forces the reader to hear them, if at all, at a distance. For example, the "Thunder" in the fifth part, "What the Thunder Said", is a clear prophetic voice, recalling the Thunder as the voice of the god Prajaparti in the Upanishads (Eliot, note of "The Wasteland" l. 402, p.53). As in the Upanishads, Thunder delivers the divine command Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata: to give alms, show compassion and exercise self-control. As in the Upanishads, all this must be understood from the only words he actually speaks, "DA DA DA" ("The Wasteland", 401, 411, 418). If such a prophecy seems ambiguous in the original text, one must wonder to what extent TS Eliot's English and American audiences might appreciate this Sanskrit play on words. Yet Eliot, throughout the poem, hides his words in quotations and phrases in Italian, Latin, French, German, and Sanskrit, which he rarely translates even in his own footnotes. Such a jumble of languages ​​obscures the message of the poem's prophets and distances the unlearned reader from understanding the poem. In other sections of “The Wasteland,” Eliot hides the prophetic voices in a cacophony of vulgar and distracting voices. In the first part, "The Burial of the Dead", we notice a certain prophetic voice, which includes the first four verses: "April is the cruelest month...", then begins again with the quote from Ezekiel: " Son of man, you I cannot say, nor guess, for you only know a heap of broken images...", and continues until it ends with: I will show you something different from either your morning shadow walking behind you, or your evening shadow rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. The use of the second person and allusion. to the revelation.