Religious Symbolisms in T.S. Eliot’s

Humanity is immense and reality has myriads of forms. Human experience is never limited and is never complete. Henry James has said, “Art lives on discussion, upon experiment, upon curiosity, upon variety of attempt, upon the exchange of views and comparison of standpoints” (Henry James, “The Art of Fiction”). Hence every text is eternally written here and now. Thus it becomes a rare verbal form, a miracle.

The first fifty years of the twentieth century saw the emergence of two major poets in Great Britain and their contribution to British poetry is of immense value. First came Walter Butler Yeats (1865-1939), an Irishman, who made rich contributions to English poetry and drama. The other, Thomas Stearns Eliot (1865-1939), who was an American who made England his home, and left behind him a wealth of literary works in prose, poetry and drama. Both the poets were modernists who came under the sway of contemporary European trends of art and literature. Their literary works show the influence of the French imagist and symbolist poets. Though differing opinions have been expressed about their relative merits as poets of international repute, it is best to regard them as two bright figures, who contributed equally to the enrichment of English literature. What is more, they inspired a young generation of English poets who appeared on the English literary scene in the years following the First World War (1914-18). The efforts that they made in relating English poetry to the ongoing European literary movements are second to none. Eliot is best known as a poet, but he is arguably the central modern critic in English, because of his vast influence in several areas. Eliot’s “Prufrock” created a small literary stir, but "The Waste Land" (1922) created an uproar.

“The Waste Land”, sometimes mistakenly written as The Wasteland, is a highly influential 434-line modernist poem by T. S. Eliot. It is perhaps the most famous and most written-about long poem of the twentieth century. Despite the alleged obscurity of the poem – its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its elegiac but intimidating summoning up of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literatures – the poem has nonetheless become a familiar touchstone of modern literature. As 1798 the year of publication of the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge marks the beginning of the Romantic period, 1922 the year in which “The Waste Land” was published indicted the advent of the modern age in English Poetry. Ulysses by James Joyce (1882-1941) was also published the same year. Both are highly experimental in character. It is noteworthy to recall that Albert Einstein’s (1879-1955) most profoundly influential essay, The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity was published in 1916, six years before “The Waste Land” and Ulysses. Einstein’s theory challenged the fundamental ideas in physics such as those of mass, gravitation, energy and light. And in poetry Eliot bequeathed a new direction in English Poetry. Experimentalism in poetry flourished in the 1920s. Poets became so engrossed in the technical aspects of writing that their involvement with how something was said and what was said sometimes became lost.

In this pursuit the poem “The Waste Land" is approached from a number of points of view. The text is subjected to deconstruction according to the post-modern theories. Roland Barthes’ and Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading theories are heavily depended upon throughout this endeavour. This attempt is not to destroy the meaning, but to enhance the meaning and a trial to capture the images and messages of the symbols in different angles. In fact the deconstruction is only an offshoot of the discipline which Eliot himself bequeathed to world literature and scholarship. The modernism which Eliot brought in poetry is the daring experimentation he gifted to world literature. Deconstruction of the text does in no way say the opposite of the apparent meaning, but rather it is a way of deeper understanding of the text. The text is approached from a number of points of view and perspectives. In this limited pursuit it is attempted is to find the religious symbols in the "The Waste Land" and interpreting those symbols. The religious symbols are interpreted in the economy of their own disciplines. Primarily religious symbols have didactic implications. And the symbols need reinterpretation time after time according to the particular context to which it is addressed. The text is always in constant effort to teach. Eliot and Arnold have written as classicists. The generations of literary work stand in the particular context to yield new, varied and excellent interpretation to the text. Infinite number of suggestions! Subtle interpretations and re-interpretations.

An attempt to examine, line by line, the specific meaning of every reference and allusion in "The Waste Land" would certainly most difficult and is beyond the scope of this work. Instead, each of the five sections of the poem and the gamut of feeling. In the first chapter, first of all we deal with the modernist symbolist movement starting with Eliot. The second chapter deals with the religious symbolisms in “The Waste Land” dwelling on the common interpretation of the symbols. This is followed by the third chapter deconstructing the religious symbolisms in “The Waste Land”. This is followed by the fourth chapter which expounds the deeper implications of the religious symbols already approached through the post-modern interpretation in the dissertation and ends with the concluding chapter.

Now, does "The Waste Land" speak anything relevant to the modern day reader? Against which background did it speak? If at all "The Waste Land" had an audience, what was the background of that audience. If at all "The Waste Land" spoke to a particular context, does it speak to the reader who reads the text in the particular space and time of the present day reader? Is communication of the poet complete without the reader? If at all the reader completes and gives meaning to the read text, what would be the difference between “then” and the “now” of the text? Does the text lives at all? Is the canon of hermeneutics closed for ever with Eliot himself? After all will the symbols mean just the opposite of what it was to mean? These are the questions this limited pursuit put forward and tries to solve with its own merits and demerits.

Chapter 2 Modernism and Religious Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

Modernism- just like Romanticism and neo-classicism in the late 17^th and 18^th centuries- began as a cultural movement that influenced all aspects of European culture of which poetry was just one, though a very important field of expression. When modernism broke with the past, the rebellion became particularly visible in the rejection of conventionally smooth poetic diction which could no longer articulate the raw, disturbing experience already handled in the avant-garde novel of Lawrence and Joyce.

Poetry abounded in isolated images and allusions. The commentary for literary references sometimes occupied as much space as the poem themselves. If the techniques were skilfully used, the result was poetry. If they were unskilfully used, the result was verbiage. From among the poets and certifiers Ezra Pund, T. S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats stand out as the most significant. Yeats precedes Pound and Eliot. He started under the influence of the decadents and symbolists and soon matured into the most powerful voice of poetry. His total involvement with the Irish Movement separated him from the other English poets. Eliot on the other hand brought to poetry a new idiom that was badly needed to cut away the inane and overdone sentimental and romantic excesses of his predecessors. His publication of "The Waste Land" in 1922 was indeed the biggest event of the post-war literary scene.

The point of affinity between Browning and modern poetry is in his obscurity and irregularity of diction. Eliot and the moderns linked the past, the "metaphysical" poets with a poet like Hopkins. Browning’s ability to create the natural articulation of a voice, which necessitated syntactical obscurity, remains a permanent legacy to modern poetry.

Juxtaposing impressions or images apparently disconnected, the poet learnt form the arrangement of multiple planes in sculpture or movements in music the fundamental technique of discontinuous composition. This is how modernism held up a faithful mirror to fragmented reality and in doing so, produced an open gestalt or transformed, indeterminate structure of coherence. “The Waste Land” may be a mimesis of the heap of broken images that modern European civilization has been reduced to but the final effect, that is, the poem, remains a mastery of fragmentation.

The technique of discontinuous composition was highlighted in Imagism, particularly under the aegis of Pound who no doubt took his cue form T.E. Hume and Ford Maddox Ford. Pound himself was an imagist.

A threefold Imagist manifesto is the following:

(i) Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.

(ii) Scrupulous avoidance of any word that did not contribute to the presentation.

(iii) Rhythmical composition in the sequence of the musical phrase, not of a metronome.

The High Modernist mode popular in British and American poetry[1] from the early 1920s to the 1950s was of course dominated by Pound and Eliot. Modernist poetry was characterised by a prodigious appetite for assimilating the disparate and fragmentary experience of a complex and heterogeneous civilization. The trauma of the First World War was first expressed by poets in the trenches challenging patriotic and military humbug; it then coloured the sensibility of an entire age.

Thus, we may say that the combination of formalism, aestheticism, impressionism, symbolism and imagism- all combined to produce the modernist mode.

2.1. Tradition and Individual Talent

The earlier modernists in England had rejected tradition and the freedom of a poet’s expression, but Eliot in essays asserted that an individual writer needs to retain his links with the past tradition, which he should carry forward to the future generations.

Eliot projects several levels of modern experience in “The Waste Land”. Indeed when Eliot published this complex poem in 1922—first in his own literary magazine Criterion, then a month later in wider circulation in the Dial— it set off a critical firestorm in the literary world. The work is commonly regarded as one of the seminal works of modernist literature. Indeed, when many critics saw the poem for the first time, it seemed too modern. T. S. Eliot was much ahead of his times. In the place of a traditional work, with unified themes and a coherent structure, Eliot produced a poem that seemed to incorporate many unrelated, little-known references to history, religion, mythology, and other disciplines. He even wrote parts of the poem in foreign languages, such as Sanskrit. In fact the poem was so complex that Eliot felt the need to include extensive notes identifying the sources to which he was alluding, a highly unusual move for a poet, and a move that caused some critics to assert that Eliot was trying to be deliberately obscure or was playing a joke on them.

Of course, for the uninitiated reader, Eliot's poems present a number of difficulties: erudite allusions, lines in a number of foreign languages, lack of narrative structure compounded by startling juxtapositions, a sense of aloofness from the ordinary sensory universe of day-to-day living. For the more sophisticated, Eliot's "modernism," his quest for "reality," may seem dated, even "romantic".

“The Waste Land”, should not be treated as puzzles to be solved, but rather, the early poems at least, as typical "modernism" which Eliot "invented" in “The Waste Land” and "Prufrock," a product of symbolism, images, and aggregation. Eliot’s emphasis throughout has been the expression of a personal, intense, even romantic effort by Eliot to get things "right" for himself in his search for order in his life, a validation of his existence, in a word, for "salvation." His techniques of juxtaposition, aggregation of images, symbolism; the use of multiple literary allusions, the influence of Dante are all worth attention; as is his use of "free verse" and various poetic forms.

2.2. Eliot’s Invention

Not only is “The Waste Land” Eliot's greatest work, but it may be-along with Joyce's Ulysses -the greatest work of all modernist literature. As the poem's dedication indicates, Eliot received a great deal of guidance from Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to cut large sections of the planned work and to break up the rhyme scheme. Recent scholarship suggests that Eliot's wife, Vivien, also had a significant role in the poem's final form. Pound’s contributions to the modern movement derived more form his editorial and talent-scouting abilities. Real stylistic innovation came for T. S. Eliot even before he had come in contact with the former. In Eliot at last we encounter the fracturing and re-fashioning of received idiom that had been achieved in music and the visual arts. "Largely on the basis of his reading of Baudelaire, Laforgue, and Jacobean drama, Eliot quite independently forged a style that not only surpassed Imagist practice but seamlessly incorporated the self-examining, self-deprecating persona timidly withdrawing from traditions of passionate immersion and confession" (Unger 93).

It was at Harvard University that Eliot, for the first time, read some works of Baudelaire, the French poet, in whom he discovered poetical possibilities that he had not found in any of the English poets. From the same source he learned how the real and imaginary worlds could be brought together in literature. It is also at Harvard that Eliot registered himself as a graduate student in philosophy since he intended to pursue philosophy as an academic career. He also studied Sanskrit, Pali and Indian Philosophy. The Bhagavad-Gita was one of the Indian classical texts that he studied with interest. He learnt abut Buddhism, the influence of which remained with him for many years. The concluding section of “The Waste Land” shows the shadow of Indian spiritual heritage on Eliot’s poetic sensibility.

2.3. Discontinuous Composition

If discontinuous composition is the hall-mark of modernist poetry, then Eliot remains its finest practitioner. Moreover, what gives coherence to the so-called heap of broken images is an essentially musical structure of relationship between part and whole.

Such a form is no doubt exemplified by “The Waste Land”. But it is discernible even in the earliest poetry of Eliot as it was for him the aesthetic equivalent of fragmentation, rootlessness, and lack of belief in modern European civilization.

According to Drew, the poem Four Quartets continues effectively to use the technique of discontinuous composition, the structure of music, and a subtly permeated self-reflexivity. "We recognize through the moving drama of faith the old dry, ironic, detached persona, the unremitting self-observation and preoccupation with language, communication and poetic form" (Drew 49). Moreover, Christianity offered Eliot a unifying design to accommodate the fragmentation of modern society; whereas for Yeats this role was performed by magic and mythology. Marriage not only gave Yeats stability and direction but more specifically, the supposedly automatic writing of his wife brought metaphors for poetry, the symbol of the gyre, moon, and mask that became the basis for his philosophical system. But as for Eliot his marriage supplied difficulties, out of which, we might say that “The Waste Land” took shape.

Besides modern methodologies, Eliot was interested in tradition and especially on myth.

The rediscovery of myth and symbol in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was itself an event with cultural consequences well beyond the disciples of anthropology, ethnology, and psychology, which first registered their potential importance for understanding human society and psychology (Helm, 208).

Helm continues, "The past, heretofore buried in ancient texts that for the most part had gone unnoticed, was found to be more ‘distant’ and remote than had been imagined; yet these texts enjoyed more authority and had greater bearing on the present than before." (Helm, 208). "The early mythologies had nothing to do with literature but were all, in some way, primitive attempts at patterened explanations of the universe, of the deity, or of nature." (Melito, 165). "Creative writers have recognized this value and have on occasion adopted myth as a useful tool of their craft. Their concern is not with the ‘truth’ or ‘falsity’ of their mythic materials. In fact, they usually abstract from that aspect. Rather myth is for the writer a means of creating a framework." (Melito, 165). The technique of the poem is similar to that of the film. The poet’s camera roves slowly over the intellectual and spiritual wasteland of his century, picking up here and there different items and embalming the anarchy in a series of shots. It is a series of scenes rather like film shots fading and dissolving in each other, seen from the viewpoint of an impersonal observer. The whole thing is observed by Tiresias who is an inclusive consciousness and the fragmentary visions are organized within the vegetation myth.

2.4. Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

Eliot’s poem is a work of literature that is richly allusive and full of symbolism. Before reading the text of "The Waste Land" one needs to remember that Eliot’s poetry is a kind of continuous and complex stream of thought, a collection of memories in which what one has experienced in the past constantly merges with his experience of the present. Once we read a favourite poet, some of his memorable lines are bound to become an essential part of our personal experience. Very often, we quote him or her to ourselves, and we experience a repeat of either one or a series of emotions in a poet or other kind of literary work. In exactly the same manner Eliot quotes his favourite writers to himself in the poem. He goes over their images, phrases and metaphors, like so many possession in the crowded storehouse of his mind.

Eliot, as he admits in his notes to the poem, uses ritualistic and mythic allusions in “The Waste Land”. “The Waste Land” projects several levels of modern experience related to various symbolic wastelands, such as those of religion, spirit and the reproductive instinct. The poem is mainly about the theme of barrenness and infertility. The curse on the land and its master, the Fisher King, is linked to the quest for the Holy Grail. Death, life-in-death, and death-in-life are some of the other themes of the poem. Life devoid of meaning is a kind of spiritual death. Eliot hopes that Eastern philosophy could possibly provide a redeeming alternative to the corruption of the European nations. All the figures depicted in the Tarot pack of cards symbolically unite in the dominating personage of Tiresias. He is the central consciousness from whose experience the various episodes make up the poem. According to Murray,

The symbolism of the waste land, garden, water, city, stairs, etc., as Eliot expresses the themes of time, death-rebirth, levels of love (and attitude toward women), and the quest motif on psychological, metaphysical, and aesthetic levels. Dante's four levels-the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic- are interesting to trace throughout Eliot's developing canon” (Murray, 365).

Murray further adds that Eliot's use of geographic place is more basic than has been given sufficient attention. The relations between geographic place and vision, between the personal, individual talent and the strong sense of tradition, are also significant.

Our primary concern is the communication the poet makes in the entire poem using religious symbolism and their significance to the overall meaning of the whole poem. Yet, it would be appropriate to give a brief account of symbolism in general before specifically studying the religious symbolism in particular.

2.4.1 Symbolisms in General

Symbolism can have an extremely wide meaning. The Oxford Advanced Learners dictionary states symbolism as, “the use of symbols to represent ideas, especially in art and literature”. Hence inone way we can say symbolism is also a kind of representation. But there is difference between a sign and a symbol. A sign is also a representation which gives information or is that which informs. But symbol is a representation and at the same time an expression. It can be used to describe any mode of expression to refer to something indirectly through the medium of another. But this doesn’t mean that a mere substitution of one object for another can be considered as this process. In fact symbolism can be considered as the process to express to express abstract ideas and emotions through the use of concrete images, as Milton does in his Paradise Regained, where he compares Satan’s defeated legions to “the autumnal leaves that strew the brooks in Vallombrosa”.

To make it more clear, or to put it in T. S. Eliot’s own words symbols are “the only way of expressing emotions in the form of art ” (Eliot “Hamlet”). But it should be noted that this expression mode is not done by just using a “symbol”, but an “objective corellative” which means a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be formula of that particular emotion. Heneri de Re’gnier, a French poet and a disciple of Mallarme defined “symbol” as being a comparison between the abstract and the concrete with one of the terms of the comparison being merely suggested. Thus the symbol stands alone with the reader being given little or no indication as to what is being symbolized.

Symbolism, hence, can be defined as the art of expressing ideas and emotions, not by describing them directly, nor by defining them through comparison with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas and emotions are by recreating them in the mind of the reader through the use of unexplained symbols or images. This is only one aspect of Symbolism which is called “Personal Aspect” or “Human Aspect” of symbolism. It should be noted that the term "symbolism" is often limited to use in contrast to “representationalism”; defining the general directions of a linear spectrum wherein all symbolic concepts can be viewed in relation, and where changes in context may imply systemic changes to individual and collective definitions of symbols.

“All forms of language are innately symbolic, and any system of symbols can form a ‘language’; at the binary system”( Lobb 42) . The written word is, therefore, symbolically representative of both the symbolic phoneme and directly to the cognitive concept which it represents. Saussure’s essay “Nature of the Linguistic Sign” has explained how language is recognition of the psychological sound image and the mental concept. The field of cognitive linguistics explores the cognitive process and relationships between different systems of phonetic symbols to indicate deeper processes of symbolic cognition. Many cultures have developed complex symbolic systems, often referred to as a symbolic system which assign certain attributes to specific things, such as types of animals, plants or weather.

Moreover symbolism was largely a reaction against Naturalism and Realism, movements which attempted to objectively capture reality. These movements invited a reaction in favour of spirituality, the imagination, and dreams; the path to Symbolism begins with that reaction. Some writers, such as Joris-Karl Huysmans, began as Naturalists before moving in the direction of Symbolism; for Huysmans, this change reflected his awakening interest in religion and spirituality. "Symbolism" may refer to a way of choosing representative symbols in line with abstract rather than literal properties, allowing for the broader interpretation of a carried meaning than more literal concept-representations allow. A religion can be described as a language of concepts related to human spirituality. Symbolism, hence, is an important aspect of most religions.

A second aspect of symbolism is described as “Transcendental Symbolism”. In such types, concrete images are used as symbols, not of particular thoughts and feelings within the poet, but of vast and general ideal world of which the real world is merely an imperfect representation. This concept of the existence of an ideal world lying beyond reality has its root sprinkled by Plato, which was popularized in eighteenth century by Swedenberg, and played a vital role in Christianity.

In Psychology, the interpretation of abstract symbols has had an important role in religion and psychoanalysis. As envisioned by Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, symbols are not the creations of mind, but rather are distinct capacities within the mind to hold a distinct piece of information. In the mind, the symbol can find free association with any number of other symbols, can be organized in any number of ways, and can hold the connected meanings between symbols as symbols in themselves. Jung and Freud diverged on the issue of common cognitive symbol systems and whether they could exist only within the individual mind or among other minds; whether any cognitive symbolism was defined by innate symbolism or by the influence of the environment around them (Murray 49).

2.4.2. Symbolism in Literature

In literature, "symbolism" may refer to the use of abstract concepts, as a way to clarify any literal interpretation, or to allow for the broader applicability of the prose to meanings beyond what may be literally described. Many writers—in fact, most or all authors of fiction—make the symbolic use of concepts and objects as rhetorical devices central to the meaning of their works. James Joyce and Brielle Gibson, for example, used symbolism extensively, to represent themes that applied to greater contexts in their contemporary politics and society.

Designed to convey impressions by suggestion rather than by direct statement, symbolism found its first expression in poetry but was later extended to the other arts. The early symbolists experimented with form, revolting against the rigidity of the Parnassians with a free verse that has outlived the movement itself. The precursors of the school, all influenced by Baudelaire, included Verlaine, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud. They were accused of writing with a decadent morbidity, partly as the result of their utilization of imagination as a reality. The movement was continued in poetry by Laforgue, Moréas, and Régnier; in drama by Maeterlinck; in criticism by Remy de Gourmont; and in music by Debussy. Among the later symbolists were Claudel, Valéry, Jammes, and the critic Camille Mauclair (Rainey 168). The influence of the French symbolists not only gave rise to similar schools in England, Germany, and other countries, but also may be traced in the development of the imagists and decadents ; it is likewise evident in the work of Arthur Symons, T. S. Eliot, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Eugene O'Neill, Hart Crane, and Wallace Stevens.

In the nineteenth century with the decline of Christian beliefs, a search for other ways to escape from the harsh reality was started. Religion was discarded for this purpose and poetry took its place. The purpose of poetry became to create for readers, a world outside reality. Stephen Mallerme’ claimed that he created in his poetry not real flower but “I’absente de tous bouquets”, the essential flower which is not to be found among any of the flowers of the world (Cottrell, "Christian Symbols in Light in August." 208). The sole purpose of his poetry, he says was to create a pure essence, unhindered and undisturbed by any echo of the concrete reality which surrounds us.

Although the aim of “Transcendental Symbolism” is to go beyond reality, the starting point is the “reality” of this world. It is so, because this helps in transition from real world to the imaginary one. As the poem proceeds, “the reality begins to be blurred and it gradually dissolves into the imaginary one. As Mallerme’ does in one of his poems where he confuses the two images of rose and lily into one imaginary flower, to create an ideal flower” ( Robinson 10). Here the essence of both is perceived in one. Symbolism is in fact a developed form of allegory. In this sense, we can trace the root of Symbolism in English literary field from William Langland’s Piers the Plowman, where Piers sees the seven deadly sins in allegorical forms. Then, it can be traced in Chaucer’s “Romance of the Rose” which was in fact the English version of original French work “Roman de la Rose” of Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. Again in Milton’s Paradise Regained, the concept of symbolism grew more ( Robinson 11).

But during all these period, poets weren’t themselves aware of this new form and therefore this form remained in its crudest form. But towards the early eighteenth century, the Christian beliefs began to decline. Hence, people began to search for new means other than religion to escape from the harsh reality of the world and ‘poetry’ became their favourite means for this purpose. In France, this escapism forced the poets to develop a new form and what discovered was the new developed version of allegory; “Symbolism”.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Baudelaire created a sensation by his sonnets named “Correspondances”( Penner, "Myth and Ritual: A Wasteland or a Forest of Symbols?" 47). It was capable of conveying thoughts and feelings of corruption, wealth and triumph to its readers and in it the objects were not just objects, but were the symbols of Ideal Forms lying concealed behind them.

In 1857, Baudelaire published his volume of poems named Les Fleurs du Mal. In this was a poem “Harmonie du Sur”, which was a milestone for the literary career of symbolism (Moody 89). In the first reading of this poem, it might appear as a simple description of landscape, but while reading it again, one can find the clue in the last line, indicating that the repeated images of the poem such as - the setting sun, the fading perfume of the flowers, the dying note of a violin - all possessing a common factor - the notion of something beautiful that has passed away, are in fact object correlatives whose purpose is to re-create in the reader the emotion experienced by the poet at the memory of a past love affair.

In Baudelaire’s ‘Spleen’ a different kind of emotion is created by the same process. It is a sad and mournful scene. It may be regarded as depicting a scene from hell, as well as conveying a mood of black despair. While the recreation of emotions of ‘ Harmonie du Sur’ and ‘Spleen’ points to Human Symbolism, the existence of ideal image of the emotions points to the presence of Transcendental Symbolism (Moody 90).

Baudelaire’s paradise symbol was a revolutionary step and it later attracted many English and French poets to use it in their poetry. In his ‘ L’Invitation au Voyage’, time is objective correlative of an immaterial world. At the end of “Les Fleurs du Mal”, Baudelaire is no longer sure exactly what is the nature of the world lying beyond reality. The probability of each possible thing awaits him - good or bad. But this helps him to rise his poem’s theme to what we can call ‘Infinity’.

The French poet Paul Verlaine, began his career at the time Baudelaire was at the height of his fame. He was influenced by “Les Fleurs du Mal”. He was impressed by Baudelaire’s shift from optimism to pessimism in it. But this transition was irregular. So Verlaine used a new type of melody to solve this problem. His melody was much more of a subtle and intimate kind where as the melody of Baudelaire tends to be splendidly out stretched with the different senses called in to play their parts in carefully chosen moments with images amply developed. Verlaine’s work differs from Baudelaire’s in another respect his attitude remains an emotional one without the use of “Transcendental symbolism”. He lacked Baudelaiure’s imagination to create a picture of the paradise awaiting.

In the early part of nineteenth century, the versification of poetry was popular because music was considered to be the equation between poetry and any other forms of art. The reason for this belief was due to the thinking that “all arts aspire towards the condition of music” (Hargrove 99). Music possesses the quality of suggestiveness, but without the element of precision which words necessarily posses and which the symbolists wished to suppress. Hence it was what symbolists were looking for. Baudelaire and Verlaine were using this versification method, but Verlaine towards the later part of his career began to use free verse which inspired Rimbaud to revolt against traditional versification. He gave poetry a new kind of strength and directness that made it a more fitting vehicle for the evocation of feelings and ideas. Patience is what Rimbaud lacked, and for this reason a critic described him as “the impatient genius”. But there was another poet who was considered to be “the genius of stubborn patience” and he was Mallarme’. The patience of Mallarme’ helped him to develop his images slowly into the infinite (Moody 95). The previous symbolists experienced a dissatisfaction, which led them to create an ideal world, with the use of “Transcendental Symbolism”. Particularly Baudelaire’s shift from certain reality to uncertainty in his poem “Les Fleurs du Mal”, provided a new clue for Mallarme. He found an answer to the longings of the symbolists’ intellectual minds. While searching for the nature of the ideal world, he reached the conclusion that “beyond this real world there is nothing but an empty void” (Hargrove 101).

2.4.3. The Symbolist Manifesto

Symbolists believed that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. The Symbolist manifesto (‘Le Symbolisme’, Le Figaro, 18 Sept 1886) was published in 1886 by Jean Moréas. Moréas announced that Symbolism was hostile to plain meanings, declamations, false sentimentality and matter-of-fact description, and that its goal instead was to clothe the Ideal in a perceptible form whose goal was not in itself, but whose sole purpose was to express the Ideal. In this art, scenes from nature, human activities, and all other real world phenomena will not be described for their own sake; here, they are perceptible surfaces created to represent their esoteric affinities with the primordial Ideals.

The Symbolist poets wished to liberate techniques of versification in order to allow greater room for "fluidity". Symbolist poems sought to evoke, rather than to describe; symbolic imagery was used to signify the state of the poet's soul. “Synesthesia was a prized experience; poets sought to identify and confound the separate senses of scent, sound, and colour. In Baudelaire's poem “Correspondences” which also speaks tellingly of forêts de symboles -forests of symbols” (Hargrove 88). More over, symbolist tended to look to Art as a contemplative refuge from the world of strife and will. From this desire for an artistic refuge from the world, the Symbolists took characteristic themes of mysticism and otherworldliness, a keen sense of mortality, and a sense of the malign power of sexuality.

2.5 Religious Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

Eliot became interested in religion in the later 1920s and eventually converted to Anglicanism. His poetry from this point onward shows a greater religious bent, although it never becomes dogmatic the way his sometimes controversial cultural criticism does. “Four Quartets”, his last major poetic work, combines a Christian sensibility with a profound uncertainty resulting from the war's devastation of Europe. Eliot died in 1965.

The Upanishads[2] became the answer to the whole of "The Waste Land". The Upanishads hold information on basic Hindu beliefs, including belief in a world soul, a universal spirit- Brahman, and an individual soul- Atman (Merrett 252). In Sanskrit, the word Brahman has two genders (masculine, Brahmâ, the creator-god or Brahman, neuter, the Absolute). Brahman is the ultimate, both transcendent and immanent, the absolute infinite existence, the sum total of all that ever is, was, or ever shall be.

The Upanishads also contain the first and most definitive explications of AUM as the divine word, the cosmic vibration that underlies all existence and contain multiple trinities of being and principles subsumed into its One Self. The Isha says of the Self (Verses 6, 7 & 8 of Isha Upanishad):

Whoever sees all beings in the soul
and the soul in all beings
does not shrink away from this.
In whom all beings have become one with the knowing soul
what delusion or sorrow is there for the one who sees unity?
It has filled all.
It is radiant, incorporeal, invulnerable,
without tendons, pure, untouched by evil.
Wise, intelligent, encompassing, self-existent,
it organizes objects throughout eternity.

– Isha Upanishad Verses 6, 7, & 8

"Aum Shanti Shanti Shanti" too, is found first in the Upanishads, the call for tranquility, for divine stillness, for Peace everlasting. This is what Eliot uses to bring about a peaceful conclusion to the entire wasteland. The complete effect of the whole poem finds peace, or conclusion only here. The self finds realization in the Brahman. The chaos of the fragmented situation is settled to a single mosaic. As Shakespeare has said “All that ends well is well”. A peaceful settlement is reached here. Even though "The Waste Land" defies linear progression or paraphrasing, it does reach a point of culmination. The quest ends in religion, and the most ancient religious preposition paradoxically provide an answer.

Eliot’s thesis is that there is no wasteland comparable to the soul of mortals. According to Eliot, humans feel deserted by God at birth. St Augustine spoke of this when he pronounced the words "how restless is my heart dear God, until it rests in Thee".

The tale of human's quest for the Grail is one of many human attempts to guide us in a search for meaning. It explains the importance of striving to attain immortality. Our contests are essentially self conquests. We search; we confront choices; we choose; we struggle; we fail or succeed. We are tested and transformed through a baptism of water, fire or blood. The cup as a symbol of the Grail also embodies all these processes.

In the Fisher King stories, a journeyer comes to a barren land and discovers a wounded king whose wound has caused the land to become sterile. In some cases, the wounding of the king was sexual in nature. Because these ancient peoples believed that the king and the land were united as one and that they reflected on each other, it was necessary to heal the king in order to heal the land. The journeyer then needs to undertake a quest (which fits the archetypal hero's journey pattern) to heal the wounded king and, through him, the land. In the Grail legends, which are frequently intertwined with the Fisher King legends, a questor searches throughout the land for the Holy Grail, undergoing tests of purity, his character, and his dedication to the quest on the way.

The nature of the Grail differs from one account to another: It is sometimes thought of as a cup which caught the blood of Christ when he was pierced by a spear while hanging on the cross,[3] and it is sometimes thought to be a stone.[4]

Perhaps the most important way that Eliot uses these underlying myths in "“The Waste Land”" to comment on the modern world is to describe modern cultural emptiness within the context of ancient myths of a heroic quest that gives meaning and relevance to life. By doing so, Eliot points out the simple fact of this cultural emptiness and its accompanying spiritual dryness and gives hints throughout the poem of where an individual can search for remedies to it. "These fragments I have shored against my ruins," writes Eliot in line 431. The entire poem can be seen as a collection of "fragments" which provide hints in various ways, especially through the many and diverse literary references that Eliot uses to suggest works that the reader can examine to see how others have attempted their own heroic quests for meaningful existence. Eliot uses the fragmentary descriptions of cultural emptiness and many juxtapositions with descriptions of past cultural richness to point to what he calls the "disassociation of sensibilities".

It has been suggested that the concept of the wasteland can be traced from one of the bleakest images found in the Old Testament: the vision of devastation depicted in Ezekiel 37. In this passage, by means of poetic imagination or through ecstatic vision, the prophet is led by the attending spirit of God through the Valley of Dry Bones and surveys the haunting remains of a massive carnage. With him, all readers behold an arid landscape, littered with skeletal remains, blasted by gusting winds; a site without a sign of life.

To a contemporary reader the image may seem surreal and abstract, yet Biblical scholarship constantly maintains that the valley's imagery is best grounded in a historical space and time. Some scholars suggest the image is focused on the results of a catastrophic defeat near Megido where King Josiah, the last strong ruler of Judah, was slain while leading his forces against an Egyptian army in 609 B.C. Others posit the valley would be near ancient Jericho where, a few years later, the kingdom of David lost yet another critical battle to the invading Babylonians. Still others opine that, therefore to the site of slaughter of refugees arround 587 B.C. near to Babylon and the life setting of the exiled prophet's community. While these settings sharply vary, each nonetheless reinforces the notion that in the prophetic mind, the scene of the dry bones represents not simply a disastrous military setback, but the dramatic, political, cultural, and religious devastation that takes place at the end of an epoch.

For Ezekiel and his Biblical contemporaries, this note of destruction and divine judgment resounds as a dominant chord within their poetry. With the downfall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C, the final remnant of the covenant people was stripped of both its king and its land. These two realities had been long been in the religious centre of Israelite culture and served as dominant means of grace for the understanding of God's interaction in the people's history. For the covenant faith to survive, events made it necessary to redefine both the identity of the people and the form of their religion. From a historical distance, we can define this as a transitional age when the divinely inspired kingdom became the people of the synagogue and the Torah.However, closer observation reveals that after the destruction, first comes the phenomenon of the wasteland: a place of shattered expectations, cultural displacement and spiritual paralysis. In the wasteland, the primary prophetic injunction is for the people to wait and wait again for an encounter initiated by God.

The experience of this slide into chaos is a defining element for the prophetic setting for the Old Testament books of Habakkuk, Obadiah, Lamentations, and much of Jeremiah. Visible in these accounts and in later witness of Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah, Chapters 40-58) is an identity crisis that leads to spiritual depression. An essential theological project of religion becomes the construction of new structures of hope. Sometimes this is questionably and poorly done. For example Ezekiel's own futuristic projection of a strong unified monarchy, which is contained in the passage following the vision of dry bones, is a historical impossibility which can never achieve realistic form.

The prophet's deeper inspiration comes with his definition of the present moment, and his comprehension that everything becomes dependent upon the movement of God. It is only when the prophet admits his own impotence and incoherence ("Son of man can these bones live?"-" O Lord God, you know."), that he receives a vision to share. Thus, from its epistemological inception, the wasteland is a symbolic place where religious culture is at every point challenged. Within the Biblical wasteland the nature of God and identity of humankind are redefined.

Chapter 3 The Themes of the Religious Symbols at the First Level

Having seen the influence of modernism in "The Waste Land", the specialities of Eliot’s poem, the general understanding of symbolism and the ways of symbolist communication, we have made an initial attempt to examine the religious symbolisms in the poem in a peripheral manner. Now in this chapter we specifically concentrate on the religious symbols and their apparent meaning and interpretation

T. S. Eliot projects several levels of modern experience in the "The Waste Land". These are related to various symbolic wastelands in modern times, such as,

a. The wasteland of religion, where there is land but no water.

b. the wasteland of spirit, where all moral springs have dried up; and

c. the wasteland of the reproductive instinct, sex has become a means of physical satisfaction rather than a source of regeneration.

The poet communicates to the reader his own sense of anarchy and futility that he finds everywhere in the contemporary world. He has no intention of expressing the disillusionment of an entire generation. But the poem remains an important document of social criticism of the world to which Eliot belonged. "The Waste Land" deals with dark and haunting themes of individual consciousness and spiritual desolation against the decline of civilisation. However the text of "The Waste Land" was written against the background of the sitz im leben (life situation) or context of T. S. Eliot. But the life situation of today’s reader is changed. And the meaning which the reader would give today might be the same or different. However, a serious study of the original context to which the text originally addressed and the possible understanding and interpretation is important. Hence, in this chapter we try to take up the major religious symbolic expositions.

3.1. Tiresias - a Symbol of Eliot

The whole poem is seen through the eyes of Tiresias. "The most significant point of view emerging out of the "The Waste Land" is that of its central voice, which is the prophesying voice of Tiresias"(Cleveland, 91). Tiresias is blind and yet he sees. A subtle paradox! Although not a character but only a spectator, he is the most important figure in the poem, uniting in himself all the others. As the one-eyed merchant merges with the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not separate from Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. “What he says is in essence, what the poem is all about” (Cleveland 91). Hence, it is evident that Tiresias is a possible mouthpiece of the poet. He also provides the connecting link between various parts of the poem, lending it a unity of perception so important in the context of the form and meaning of the "The Waste Land".

Tiresias, thus, becomes an important model for modern existence. Neither man nor woman, and blind yet able to see with ultimate clarity, he is an individual who does not hope or act. He has, like Prufrock, "seen it all," but, unlike Prufrock, he sees no possibility for action. Whereas Prufrock is paralyzed by his neuroses, Tiresias is held motionless by ennui and pragmatism. He is not quite able to escape earthly things, though, for he is forced to sit and watch the sordid deeds of mortals; like Sibyl in the poem's epigraph, he would like to die but cannot. The brief interlude following the typist's tryst may offer an alternative to escape, by describing a warm, everyday scene of work and companionship; however, the interlude is brief, and Eliot once again tosses us into a world of sex and strife. Tiresias disappears, to be replaced by St. Augustine at the end of the section. “Eliot claims in his footnote to have deliberately conflated Augustine and the Buddha, as the representatives of Eastern and Western asceticism” (Moody 55). Both seem, in the lines Eliot quotes, to be unable to transcend the world on their own: Augustine must call on God to "pluck [him] out," while Buddha can only repeat the word "burning," unable to break free of its monotonous fascination. The poem's next section, which will relate the story of a death without resurrection, exposes the absurdity of these two figures' faith in external higher powers. That this section ends with only the single word "burning," isolated on the page, reveals the futility of all of man's struggles. He leaves the burning effect to be consumed by its flames.

The fact that Tiresias was both male and female may mean that Eliot meant him to represent all people, male and female of our society. It is when we realize that Tiresias is a representation of us, that we realize his other characteristics and ask ourselves if they represent our own. Tiresias is all-knowing, but he is also blind. Could it be that we are like him in that we possess much knowledge but do not possess the ability to use it effectively? It could be. With the daily advancements in technology we make, should not we be doing more than our forefathers? Charity gets pushed to the wayside, and it seems that very few technological undertakings begin with the intent to better people's lives. Could that be humanity’s blindness? This could be.
Tiresias can also predict the future, but people rarely take his advice. Could this represent morality as a society? Yes it could be. All are aware how to conduct themselves morally, but how often do people do the right thing? How often will we write off personal interests to live ethical lives?

Thus, we may claim that Tiresias is the symbol of humanity, or is the poet himself, or could be his own moral consciousness or the humanity’s collective consciousness.

3.2. The Wasteland of Religion

“The sea of faith

Was once, too, at the full

………………………….

But now I only hear

It’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” (Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”)

The first line of the "The Waste Land", "April is the Cruellest month…" is an inversion of the popular myth that April is a time of warmth, love and joy. The Christians connect it with Easter and the Resurrection of Christ. In the fertility myths, the coming of spring is associated with the growth of potency and fertility in mankind, animals and the earth. The trees and plants drawing life-giving sap from the land through their roots grow leaves and flowers in their branches. The flowers eventually develop into fruits with seed that are a promise of the life to come in the following years. But these things are anticipated in Eliot’s poem with fear rather than hope, and thus April is cruel rather than kind.

April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, though, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Marie's childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledging, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in “The Waste Land”. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture.

Tiresias observes with dismay the coming of April and its perverse effect on the people of the "The Waste Land". They fear the onset of the season of life-giving rain since they are incapable of enjoying the mysterious process of the regeneration of the earth. They prefer the cold of the winter to the warmth of the summer. To them, winter is a symbol of spiritual decay, of an animalistic life that involves merely eating, sleeping and breeding, which they seem to prefer to a meaningful life of spirituality and thought. Such a way of life, of survival by instinct is contrasted by Eliot with April, the popular symbol of growth and regeneration. The speaker describes a true wasteland of "stony rubbish"; in it, he says, man can recognize only "a heap of broken images." Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness-“a handful of dust”-which is so profound as to be frightening.

"The Fire Sermon" ends with reference to quotations from the teachings of two visionaries, the Buddha of the East and St. Augustine of the West. Both religious philosophers significantly use the imagery of fire to convey their impression of lust. On this point the wisdom of the East and the West somehow arrives at the same conclusion.

Eliot thought that the fifth and the last part of "The Waste Land", entitled “What the Thunder said”, was not only the best part, but the only part that justified the whole poem. In the first section of part V, three themes are introduced: the journey to Emmaus, the approach of the Chapel perilous, the present decay of Eastern Europe. The disciples do not recognize Christ, just risen from the grave, joins them and explains to them how his death and resurrection were in full accord with the divine plan. The disciples do not recognise Christ until the breaking of the bread, and then Christ disappears from the scene. The approach to the Chapel Perilous is the final stage of the quest for the Holy Grail. The decay of Eastern Europe is a reference to the Red Revolution of Russia under the Czars in November, 1917, with the refugees fleeing to West Europe. None of these themes is resolved in “What the Thunder said”, three journeys merge here but remain inconclusive.

There is no water in this land, only rocks and a winding sandy road which goes up among the dry and bare-mountains. If only there was water, the travellers on the road would gladly stop to drink. But, for want of that, they can neither stop to rest nor think of what to do. The heat of the sand underfoot dries their sweat. The rock is like the cavity-filled mouth of the mountain that does not spite or yield any water. This is no place to rest and refresh oneself. The dry mountains are not silent but echoing with the sound of rainless thunder. There is not even the solace of solitude. So what the narrator of the poem repeatedly asks for is only some water without rock, and , if that were not possible, let it be rock with a little water. He desperately craves for a spring, a pool among the rocks. Above all sounds, he cares for the sound of water flowing over a rock, surrounded by the pine trees and the song of the hermit-thrush. But, unfortunately, his eager ears do not hear the “drip, drop drip drop” sound of water. This shows how the world is devoid of spiritual consolation.

The poet suddenly has thoughts of the River Ganga and its land, India. In the heat of the summer, while the river was almost dry and the lifeless, leaves of the trees on the banks awaited the rain, the dark clouds gather over the Himalayas, and the forest waited in silence. At that time the thunderis heard. In terms of the message of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad V,2. The threefold offspring of Brahma, the Creator; men, gods and demons, approach him after finishing their formal education. To each group, he says only one syllable, “DA”, and they interpret it according to their separate ways of thinking. The men interpret it as datta, which means “to give”. The demons interpret it as dayatvam, which means “to be compassionate”. The gods interpret it as damyata, which means “to control oneself”. When the three groups express what they understand by “DA”, Brahma responds with OM, which signifies that they have understood him.

The thunder in heaven repeats that very message. DA, DA, DA, i.e., give to the needy, be compassionate, exercise self-control. One should practise this very three-fold advice, and that is how Dr. Radhakrishnan interprets the fable in the Principal Upanishads (289). The fable concludes by asking men to practice all the three commands for there are no gods or demons other than men. Eliot adopts this very interpretation, and lends to it his own meaning.

The religious assumption of the poem is so succinct. Eliot says that in this world we are like prisoners in a locked cell. The key in the lock turned only once. And that is when we are truly compassionate towards the underprivileged. To remember the key is a confirmation of our worldly imprisoned state. Perhaps only at nightfall do we remember our true state like Coriolanus, the Shakespearean hero who was a prisoner of his own conscience, and eventually perished for his own past misdeeds of arrogance and want of compassion. As for damyata, Eliot translates the word as “control” when the more accurate rendering would be “restrain” or “control yourselves”. However, the emphasis in this third command of the thunder is on self-control or self-restraint. The image that the poet evokes in support of the Upanishdic idea is that of a boat, well-equipped with sail or that which responds to the hand of the helmsman who controls its movement. When the mind is like a calm sea, the heart of an individual like the boat would easily respond to the guiding hand of the captain.

The final benediction of Eliot may be read “as reflecting the peace of enlightenment, or as indicating no more than exhausted subsidence or failing into a consolatory formula, a termination rather than an ending.

Moreover, Eliot, by reference to Baudelaire, compels the reader to confront the vice of boredom or spiritual emptiness in order to realize how he himself is situated. After going through "The Waste Land”, the reader shares with the poet a state of deep spiritual emptiness, something that the poem projects among several other things.

Different speakers in “The Waste Land” mirror the disjointedness of modern experience by presenting different viewpoints that the reader is forced to put together for himself. This is similar to the disassociation in modern life in that life has ceased to be a unified whole: various aspects of 20^th century life, various academic disciplines, theory and practice, Church and State, and Eliot's "disassociation of sensibilities," or separation of heart and mind - have become separated from each other, and a person who lives in this period of time is forced to share these fragments against his or her ruins, to borrow Eliot's phrase, to see a picture of an integrated whole.

3.3. Greek Religious Fertility Myth and Meaning

References to the vegetation myths are sprinkled throughout "The Waste Land". For instance, Stetson's friend asks, "That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout?" (lines 71-72). As a footnote to the text points out, this is a distortion of the ritual death of a fertility god who was reborn later in the year, symbolizing the death of plant life in winter and its rebirth later in spring. God does not get degenerated. But religion gets degenerated. Religious faith dies out. A dead land and dull roots need to revive themselves.

The details of the rituals differed from culture to culture, as did the name of the god, but all stemmed from the response of a people to the dying and rebirth of plant life through the seasonal cycle. The poem, in fact, begins with the regeneration of plant life in April, in which lilacs begin to sprout from the "dead land" and in which "dull roots" are revived with "spring rain." (lines 1-2, 3-4).

Other references to the ritual death and rebirth of a fertility god can be found, for instance, in the fourth section, "Death by Water." In this section, the death of Phlebas the Phoenician is associated with a ritual at Alexandria in which a representation of the head of Adonis was cast into the ocean, and then removed after seven days.

3.4. The Wasteland of Moral Degeneration

T. S. Eliot’s wasteland is the European scene immediately after the end of the First World War. He is dismayed by the emotional and spiritual sterility surrounding him everywhere in Europe. Consequently, his poem presents a horrifying vision of the modern world. It is linked to the popular myth of the Fisher King who became impotent through sickness, and whose lands were devastated by barrenness. The location of "The Waste Land" is a place where the people, surprisingly, pray for winter but not for spring, since all normal values are topsy-turvy in that land.

The Tarot pack of cards, once used for prophesying important events, is reduced in the hands of Madame Sosostris the "famous clairvoyants" into an instrument of ordinary fortune telling. It is significant that she is not able to find in her pack the card of the "Hanged Man". Representing some hanged God (or even Christ on the Cross), a symbol of redemption, life and fertility. The prophesying Tarot cards of Madame Sosotris are now used for vulgar fortune telling, which marks the decline of values in the modern European society. Here it should be noted that Eliot makes extensive use of the pack of Tarot cards as a symbolic structural device in "The Waste Land". In The Tempest Ariel informs Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, of his father’s death by drowning in a shipwreck. The symbolic pattern of these images is repeated in the fourth part of "The Waste Land", “Death by Water”.

The two episodes of love in “The Burial of the Dead” are studies in contrast, symbolising the gulf separating the ecstasy of love from the frustration in love. The Hyacinth Girl standing in rain with flowers in her arms is an image of youthful aspiration and passion that is bound to have a tragic end. That is how Eliot, the consummate poet, conveys his impression of the frustrations suffered by his contemporary generation.

The female figures speak freely of their loneliness and fear. Among them we have the Hyachinth Girl, Philomela, the Thames Daughters, the woman at the pub, and the sophisticated lady in "A Game of Chess". The satirical tone of the apparently impersonal Tiresias is influenced by an allusion to the tragic rape of Philomela, which manifests the recurring image of woman as victim in the "The Waste Land". The objects of Eliot’s irony are not only women in general, but also the meaningless man-woman relationships such as those of the Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth I, the clerk and the typist, the rich young men and their girl friends.

Another picture of corruption is seen in the second part of the poem, "A Game of Chess", Shakespeare’s Cleopatra (Queen of Egypt) amidst her affluence and wealth once again depicts the lot of the modern man of the twentieth century. The grand works of classical art no longer sustain him in his search for ideal attainments. The rape of Philomel’s virginity the metaphorically repeated in Eliot’s "The Waste Land", represents the perverse act which is the result of a combination of man’s scientific temper with his spiritual dryness.

In "The Fire Sermon", the third part of "The Waste Land", we encounter Tiresias, the blind visionary, who pronounces his judgement upon the existing relationship between modern men and women. According to him, this very significant and vital natural relationship is reduced to a meaningless physical ritual. Even Cleopatra, that great romantic figure of ancient history, is degenerated into a psychiatric patient who needs counsel and help. What Tiresias and all other characters in Eliot’s poem see is the poet’s vision of the futility of human behaviours in a social context.

The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Unlike the desert, which at least burns with heat, this place is static, save for a few scurrying rats. Even the river, normally a symbol of renewal, has been reduced to a "dull canal." The ugliness stands in implicit contrast to the "Sweet Thames" of Spenser's time.

The vital relationship of regeneration between man and woman is reduced to a meaningless sexual ritual. What Tiresias, the prophetic central voice of "The Waste Land", discovers and comments on, is the poet’s vision of the futility of human endeavour in a social context. The Buddha and St. Augustine, visionaries of the East and the West, respectively, seem to agree in their pronouncements of the physical aspect of love. The decay of youth into old age is only a pointer towards death and destruction. But in the midst of spiritual dryness there is hope in Christ’s sacrifice and the message of the Upanishad: give in charity, sympathise with fellow human beings, and control your desires. Eliot’s poem ends on a note of peace.

Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legend's wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliot's world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legend's imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative (like religion or mythology) in the modern world.

In "The Waste Land" Eliot also merges past and present to show the moral degradation in a wholistic view. Eliot contrasts the past with the present in several ways throughout the poem. The simplest of these is the simple juxtaposition of one or more descriptions of the present immediately before or after one or more descriptions of the past. The most obvious of these is section two, in which two descriptions of the present (lines 111-139 and 140-172) immediately follow a description of the past (lines 77-110). In this case, the juxtaposition is used to hold the modern attitude toward sex and love next to an attitude from the past. In the first part of section two, the description opens with a reference to the description of Antony and Cleopatra's first meeting in Shakespeare's play Antony and Cleopatra, and Eliot's footnote explicitly refers the reader to that passage. The love and passion of Antony and Cleopatra was an event that changed the future of the Roman Empire and, through that, influenced the direction of the Western world. This passage is rich and seductive in detail, controlled in tone, and cohesive in structure.

In contrast, the passage immediately following can be seen as a conversation between Eliot and his wife, Vivian[5], who slowly went insane throughout the course of their marriage. Unlike the passion of Antony and Cleopatra, Eliot's love for Vivian was hopeless and without power. This middle passage of section two is Spartan in detail, distressed in tone, and disjointed in structure.

The last part of section two, which also contrasts with the first section, consists of what may be an overheard conversation in a pub. Two speakers discuss a conversation that one of them previously had, in which this speaker remonstrates another friend, Lil, for her attitude toward sex. In this section, the friend describes the sexual relationship between Lil and her husband Albert, who "wants a good time" after four years in the British army (line 147). The sexual relationship described here is lacking in both love and passion; Albert only wants a good time, but is displeased with the appearance that Lil's teeth give her. As pointed out before, Lil rejects a part of the life cycle and the natural result of sex, the continuation of the life cycle through the creation of a new life in childbirth. Lil suffers a quicker aging as a result of this rejection. The non-sexual relationship between Lil and Albert is also crystallized by the friend's question of what Lil did with the money. Lil's use of the money, which was perhaps used to pay for the abortion, implies a lack of honesty between the couple. The rest of the story told in this passage gives no impression of a meaningful relationship between Lil and Albert. This last passage of section two is random in detail, vulgar in tone, and seemingly unregulated in structure.

The myths, and symbols of fertility and sterility are central to the first part of "The Waste Land”. These are noticed in the images of the Hyachinth girl, Madame Sosotris, the Phonician sailor, and the corpse in the garden, which are linked to speculations on life, life-in-death, death-in-life, decay and renewal water and spring, memory and desire, past and present. The fertility theme is projected through the symbolism of spring rain, wet hair, vegetation and flowers. At the same time, it is contrasted with the dryness of the arid landscape. A biblical allusion of the Old Testament, Ezekiel, Chapter 37 again highlights the barrenness of "The Waste Land". The dead trees provide no shelter, the dry stones give no sound of water. “Caught between two shadows of morning and evening, of youth and age, the mankind is haunted by the fear of mortality and doom” (Gordon 11).

"The Waste Land" is mainly concerned with the theme of barrenness in the mythical wasteland of the twentieth century. "The land having lost its fertility, noting useful can grow in it; the animals and crops have forgotten the true significance of their reproductive function, which was meant to rejuvenate the land" (Williamson 112). The negative condition of the land is closely related to that of its lord, the Fisher King, who too, through illness and maiming, has lost his procreative power. There is some curse on the land and its master, and this could be removed only by a concerted effort at spiritual regeneration. This idea links "The Waste Land” to the legend of the quest of the Christian knights for the Holy Grail[6], which has been a recurring theme in the literatures of the Christian nations. The physical sterility of the original Christian legend is replaced by spiritual sterility in Eliot’s poem.

Eliot uses religious personalities to expose his belief and premises. St. Augustine's Confessions (lines 307 and 309-310), a work in which large parts describe Augustine's struggle for control over his own lustful desires before his conversion to Christianity. In contrast, however, the Thames-daughters not only fail to control access to and the expression of their sexuality, but seem to see no reason to do so. Sexual activity is not something that they seem to see as worthy of control. The attitudes toward love and sex throughout the poem reflect the spiritual dryness that Eliot symbolizes with “The Waste Land”.

The two women of "the game of chess" of the poem represent the two sides of modern sexuality: while one side of this sexuality is a dry, barren interchange inseparable from neurosis and self-destruction, the other side of this sexuality is a rampant fecundity associated with a lack of culture and rapid aging. The first woman is associated by allusion with Cleopatra, Dido, and even Keats's Lamia, by virtue of the lushness of language surrounding her, although Eliot would never have acknowledged Keats as an influence. She is a frustrated, overly emotional but not terribly intellectual figure, oddly sinister, surrounded by "strange synthetic perfumes" and smoking candles. She can be seen as a counterpart to the title character of Eliot's earlier "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," with whom she shares both a physical setting and a profound sense of isolation. Her association with Dido and Cleopatra, two women who committed suicide out of frustrated love, suggests her fundamental irrationality. Unlike the two queens, however, this woman will never become a cultural touchstone. Her despair is pathetic, rather than moving, as she demands that her lover stay with her and tell her his thoughts. The lover, who seems to be associated with the narrator of this part of the poem, can think only of drowning and rats among dead men's bones. The woman is explicitly compared to Philomela, a character out of Ovid's Metamorphoses who is raped by her brother-in-law the king, who then cuts her tongue out to keep her quiet. She manages to tell her sister, who helps her avenge herself by murdering the king's son and feeding him to the king. The sisters are then changed into birds, Philomela into a nightingale. This comparison suggests something essentially disappointing about the woman, that she is unable to communicate her interior self to the world. The woman and her surroundings, although aesthetically pleasing, are ultimately sterile and meaningless, as suggested by the nonsense song that she sings.

Again, the title of the third part of "The Waste Land" is taken form the Fire Sermon preached by Buddha to convince his followers, the Buddhists, of he negative and evil influence of the human mind of the fires of lust, passion, infatuation and hatred.

3.5. The Wasteland of Death

At a different level the meaning, one of the themes of "The Waste Land" is also death; "Death by Water" being only one aspect of it. "Death by Water" was inspired by his reading of the Italian poet Dante’s Inferno, part of the Divine Comedy (Matthiessen 11). "Death by Water", the fourth part of "The Waste Land" contains some pictures of death by drowning and comments on the decay of youth into old age. "The world is a whirlpool that draws high and low, rich and poor, Christian and Jew, into its destructive vortex, as there is no permanence of human endeavour" (Kristian, 33). The fifth and last part of the poem, "What the Thunder Said", begins the journey over the desert to the Perilous Castle, which is connected with the legendary quest for the Holy Grail. The vision of a land without water again presents a view of dryness and sterility.

“The Waste Land” is infertile, and the earth is frequently seen as a maternal symbol. It seems safe to believe that the earth can be seen, then, as a symbol of feminine sexuality in this poem. If this is true, then the rain that the earth needs to become fertile again can be seen as a symbol of masculine sexuality. It is the lack of an appropriate and meaningful union between earth and rain, between masculine and feminine principles, that prevents the earth from being fertile and turns it into a waste land. At the end, the completion of the quest by the Grail knight brings rain, reuniting these principles and restoring the earth's fertility. This restoration of the appropriate union between masculine and feminine symbols also begins again the life cycle, allowing for regeneration and the resurrection of vegetation. Resurrection is a major theme of "“The Waste Land”," especially the annual rebirth of plant life and the fertility god and the resurrection of Jesus, who is sometimes identified with pagan fertility gods. The introduction, for instance, points out that Weston's From Ritual to Romance, which Eliot drew on for the poem, makes this connection.

The crowds flowing over London Bridge, every day, morning and evening, are not independent human beings, but the slavish victims of a mechanical way of life, bereft of the vitality of real living. The planting of a corpse in the modern wasteland is not a sacred ritual but its antitheses comparable to the action of a dog first burying and then digging up a bone. The dog digs up the bone in order to prevent it from blossoming into new life. It is obvious that Eliot deliberately uses symbolic and mythical imagery and literary allusions for expressing his deeply thought out meaning brought a well-ordered artistic pattern, whish is his poem "The Waste Land".

Again “death by Water” is a revised version of the last seven lines of a French poem, “Dans le Restaurant”, that Eliot wrote in May-June 1981. This part of the "The Waste Land" refers to the various associated connections of water with morality and the theme of death by drowning. It has links with the drowned god of the fertility cults and the shipwreck in The Tempest of Shakespeare, and with the death of Ophelia in Hamlet. In ancient Egypt, the yearly ritual of the god’s head being thrown into the Nile was an enactment of the death and resurrection of the god. The Bengali Hindus follow the same ritual on the tenth day of the Durga Puja Festival in October when they immerse decorated images of the goddess in the Hoogly, the sea, or the nearest river. In Eliot’s poem, the emphasis is on death, and not on the hope of rebirth into a new life. Perhaps there is also an allusion to the Christian sacrament of baptism, at which the holy water becomes an agent of death of the old self and rebirth of the spirit.

3.6. The Author and the Text

“Ah! Love! Let us be true

To one another! For the world which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” (Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”)

The beauty of the lines is self expressive. They have originated from a Victorian background and life situation. The Victorianism or the hypocritical mind setup heavily haunts the mind of the poet. In fact the background of "The Waste Land" also has a personal life situation. Eliot was undergoing trauma.

"The Waste Land" was mostly written in 1921, when Eliot was under great strain due to a breakdown suffered by his wife, Vivien. At that time, he was himself feeling mentally exhausted. Hence, the writing of the poem took longer than he had anticipated. The first mention of the "The Waste Land" was made by Eliot in November, 1919, in a letter to a friend, John Quinn. For many years even before that he had been writing fragments which were later included in the final version of the poem that appeared in the first number of the Criterion (October 1922), a literary journal edited by Eliot.

The second part of "The Waste Land" is named after a play called A Game of Chess by the English dramatist Thomas Middleton (1580-1627). That drama is a political allegory about the conflict between England and Spain, which extended over a prolonged period in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In the actual game of chess in Middleton’s play, the white pieces represent the English, while the black pieces are the Spaniards because of their comparatively dark complexion. By choosing the title of this part of his poem, Eliot is suggesting that the relationships of men and women, as shown here, are like the moves and countermoves in a subtle game of chess, both parties trying to overcome each other.

The first twenty lines of this part of the "The Waste Land" recall the literary tradition of the Renaissance period in Europe dealing with the subject of fatal romantic passion. The artificial language and diction as well as the style of these line satirize the mode of expression of that tradition.

Eliot's London resembles Baudelaire's Paris ("Unreal City"), Dickens's London ("the brown fog of a winter dawn") and Dante's hell ("the flowing crowd of the dead"). The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of ghoulish questions about a corpse buried in his garden: again, with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility.

3.7. The Text Against the Wider Context

“The Waste Land” takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poem's epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which Sibyl looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyl's predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of “The Waste Land”, in as much as it can be said to have one, revolves around Eliot's reading of two extraordinarily influential contemporary cultural/anthropological texts, Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance and Sir James Frazier's The Golden Bough. Both of these works focus on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; of particular interest to both authors is the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated “wasteland” (Kenner 77).

Finally, we may also say that the post-Elizabethan and post-Victorian periods, coming at the end of two of the longest reigning British monarchs, give rise to several similar trends in British literature. Coinciding with this change in sovereigns, the poets of these periods begin to re-examine the changing place of man in the cosmos and endeavour to discover a new path for man to follow. This is particularly noticeable in the works of Shakespeare's Hamlet, King Lear, and The Tempest, and in Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, “The Waste Land”, “Ash Wednesday”, and “Little Gidding” as well as in Donne's Divine Meditations and Yeats' "Lapis Lazuli." In the post-Elizabethan era, Shakespeare and Donne explore the world in light of the growing age of secular and religious uncertainty while in the Modernist era; Yeats and Eliot do so in the shadows of a materialistic, alienated world. The common theme which links these poets is that a world, which on one level appears to man as alienated and pessimistic, can, upon reflection, be seen in a renewed optimistic light in which he begins to understand the need to be reconciled with others in a world of interdependent relationships.

Eliot initially views man in Prufrock, and in most of “The Waste Land” as moving through an alienated, fearful world; however, towards the end of “The Waste Land” and especially in “Ash Wednesday”, he begins to view man as gradually growing to understand his place in the community of man.

In Eliot's last poem, “Little Gidding”, he presents man as having achieved a final, religious reconciliation with himself and with the collective consciousness of his fellow man. Finally, in contrast to Eliot's religious answers, Yeats seeks to find secular answers to man's despair by drawing strength from past civilizations in such works as "Sailing to Byzantium," "Two Songs From a Play," and "Lapis Lazuli." Unlike Eliot, though, Yeats draws his optimism from the individual's relation to a small community of like-minded Romantic artists who have found man's imaginative vision of reality their answer.

In order to understand the forces that motivated these writers, it is necessary to examine the factors that were at play during the end of the Elizabethan and Victorian eras. Eliot presents a pattern of pessimism, discovery, and the potential for optimism in Prufrock, “The Waste Land”, Ash Wednesday, and Little Gidding. What links Eliot so closely with Shakespeare is his use of many of the symbols, such as water, wind, and fire, that would be more familiar to the Elizabethan audience than the modern reader. In each work, there is a slowly growing understanding of what is needed to go from pessimism to optimism.

In “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”, for example, Eliot presents an early twentieth-century man who views the manifestations of World War I society around him as sterile and tentative, who regards his relation to others as being estranged, and who depicts himself as lacking even the ability to question his own meaning in life. The only hint of optimism occurs when he ponders the redemptive nature of death by water. In the end, he is unable to achieve even this. In “The Waste Land”, the pessimistic alienation of man parallels that of the primitive elements of fire, air, water, and earth. It is only when these elements come together that there is the hint of optimistic redemption. In Ash Wednesday, Eliot depicts optimism and pessimism in an alternating series of sections in which a despairing man's optimistic view of the spiritual world of the Garden of Eden leads him to a better appreciation of his temporal world. It is only in “Little Gidding” that Eliot's character is able to realize fully the optimistic nature of being reunited with the symbols of man's collective past and is thus able to live fully in the present in union with man through love. While Eliot's narrators make use of the symbols of the past to gain understanding, it is in the present that they must overcome pessimism. Like Eliot, Yeats uses symbols from the past to unite present man, but he does so by joining man to a select group of spirits guided by visionary romanticism.

In contrast to Prufrock, “The Waste Land” offers a somewhat increased possibility for hope and redemption. In “The Waste Land” the four primordial elements, earth, air, fire, and water, play an important part in the symbolism of the work. A reading of these elements in terms of their traditional Elizabethan values affords a view of the poem in a more optimistic light. According to Tillyard's The Elizabethan World Picture, the four elements were viewed by the Elizabethans as being in competition with each other. When one dominated over the others, chaos would result

The opening section, "The Burial of The Dead," is filled with the images of memories of water having interacted with the earth in the past contrasting with the waterless present of the wasteland. There are images of "Memory and desire, stirring / Dull roots with the spring rain," (lines 3-4) and of "Earth in forgetful snow, feeding / A little life with dried tubers" (lines 6-7). There is the recollection of a slide ride on snow in the narrator's youth. In the second section, the focus switches from the past to the present. Now there are images of "the dry stone no sound of water" (line 24) and "fear in a handful of dust" (line 30). The next section, which reflects back to the previous year, recalls the hyacinth girl with her "hair wet." In a transition, Eliot ends the second section with a comparison of the sea with the wasteland: "Oed' und leer das Meer" (line 43). Now all of his images of water will be associated with death. The narrator talks about the "drowned Phoenician Sailor" (line 47) and calls for us to "Fear death by water" (line 55). There are images of fog in which a flowing crowd seeks death. In the last section of this section, there are allusions to those in ships, and those planting corpses which complete the transformation of the water into the earth, the life force into death.

In the second section, "A Game of Chess," there are images of the other two Elizabethan elements: fire and wind. The section begins with numerous mocking images of fire with a Cleopatra-like lady sitting on a "burnished throne" observing the flames of the candelabra. The first hint of wind is given by a reference to "the air that freshened" (lines 89-90). The elements of fire and air are combined for a brief moment in the image of smoke rising from the candle flames. The first glimpse of the wind seems to indicate some motion in the wasteland, a breaking up of the fire by the wind. Then there is a return to the images of burning but this time in combination with the water image: "sea-wood fed with copper / Burned green and orange" (lines 94-95). In the end of the first section we again meet the girl in "The Burial of the Dead." This time she does not have "hair wet" but "Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into the words, then would be savagely still" (lines 108-10). This is perhaps the most striking change from the water images observed in the first section to those of fire in the second. In the next section, there is the sound of the "wind under the door" (line 118), but when the narrator asks what is going on, he is told "nothing again nothing" (line 120). The section ends with images of "hot water" and "hot gammon" (line 134). Throughout this section, images of heat and fire give way only briefly to those of wind and air. Thus in the first two sections, Eliot has introduced all four elements and has shown them isolated from one another.

Thus, we may conclude the context “The Waste Land” in Eliot's own time. It is the post World War I situation. Literally, the battlefields of France where the war was fought - the French and the British against the Germans - were a muddy wasteland, planted liberally with corpses. Figuratively, post World War I Europe is a spiritual and emotional waste land. Why spiritual? Many people lost their faith in Christianity after the war because they couldn't reconcile the idea of a benevolent, loving God with mass slaughter. Emotionally, people were shattered: nothing in history had prepared them for the sight of so much death; the Industrial Revolution created armaments capable of killing masses in seconds.

Many people saw the poem as an expression of disillusionment with contemporary society, which Eliot believed was culturally barren. His work “The Hollow Men” (1925), based partly on unedited portions of “The Waste Land” manuscript, takes a similar view.

However, the poem's initial reception was mixed; though many hailed its portrayal of universal despair and ingenious technique, others, such as F. L. Lucas, detested the poem from the first, while Charles Powell commented "so much waste paper" (Gordon 19). Edmund Wilson's influential piece for The New Republic, "The Poetry of Drought," which many critics have noted is unusually generous in arguing that the poem has an effective cohesive structure, emphasizes autobiographical and emotional elements:

Not only is life sterile and futile, but men have tasted its sterility and futility a thousand times before. T. S. Eliot, walking the desert of London, feels profoundly that the desert has always been there. Like Tiresias, he has sat below the wall of Thebes; like Buddha, he has seen the world as an arid conflagration; like the Sibyl, he has known everything and known everything in vain (Gordon 15).

Chapter 4 A Post-Structuralist Understanding of "The Waste Land"

In this chapter, a new interpretation to the symbols of "The Waste Land" is attempted. In the previous chapter a general or so to say a popular interpretation of the text was attempted, but in this chapter we bring in a post-structuralist discipline in interpreting "The Waste Land". Before explaining the text proper we try to explain the new way. Eliot helped to formulate the modern way of reading and writing that eschewed Romantic values and furthered an aesthetic of “hard, dry” images and sentiments. Eliot, besides being a poet was also a great critic. He has actually formulated "The Waste Land" against the background of his own critical theories of combination. I in this chapter attempt to compare the premises of his theories against "The Waste Land".

Eliot was a very cautious critic. He does not say his opinion in a moment of time, but hard and strict scientific study and scholarship is behind his criticism. He had worked out his theories and poems with utmost concentration and care. As a critic, Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view of the bulk and quality of his critical writings. Eliot was an extraordinarily influential critic. In fact “Eliot’s influence as a poet and critic has done a lot to establish a climate favourable to objective criticism, eschewing the nebulous impressionism of the preceding age” (Jacobus 112). His best critical writing analyses and clarifies the theoretical and technical problems which had a bearing on his writing poetry. Eliot as a critic can be considered a successor of Matthew Arnold, because he assumed the role of a guardian of culture; like Arnold, he laid stress on impartiality, and proper evaluation of a poet. Eliot is indeed the leading light of English criticism in the first part of the twentieth century. Some of the terms which are widely discussed in critical circles came from him. After Arnold it is Eliot who held up the classical principle of literature in the west. Eliot’s poetry and his drama as well has a common substrate of ideology and cultural manifestation. His first book, The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920), containing seminal essays like “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet”, was central to his achievement as a critic. It is this early work which influenced the New Critics. His successful practice as a poet gave special weight to his pronouncement as a critic. The famous critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind [Eliot] invented. Let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind" (Ackroyd 44).

4.1. A Deconstruction of "The Waste Land"

Jacques Derrida was an Algerian-born French literary critic and philosopher of Jewish descent, most often referred to as the founder of deconstruction. His “Structure, Sign and Play” was a paper contributed to a conference held at Johns Hopkin’s University in 1966. Derrida’s “Structure”, originally published in 1970, is justly labelled one of the more easily comprehensible texts in his large body or work. In it, he discusses some of his basic notions of post-structuralism and deconstruction. The essay remains one of the key texts of basic post-structuralist thought.

According to him, each word exists in a complex web of language and gives rise to a variety of denotations and connotations making it impossible to arrive at a final meaning. Signification, according to Derrida is unstable and indeterminate. Hence he is less concerned with establishing a firm and final meaning than with showing the elusive nature of the text and stressing the inderminacy of all texts and the inadequacy of all readings.

Poststructuralism has played a great role in shaping the direction of other schools and movements such as feminist criticism, post-colonial theory, cultural studies and queer theory. Towards the close of the twentieth century and thereafter Poststructuralism seems to have become the leading edge of post-modernism. “Structure” is the starting point of post structuralism and the subsequent theories.

At its core, poststructuralist deconstruction is an attempt to open a text to several meanings and interpretations. Although its influence on literary studies is probably most well-known and well-reported effect, its roots are more philosophical than literary. A rough and ready definition of deconstruction would be “reading against the grain” or “reading the text against itself”. All these emphasise the close reading of the texts to demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory meanings. Thus, deconstructing a text involves showing multiple and conflicting strands of narrative, threads of meaning that cross and contradict one another.

According to Barbara Johnson, deconstruction is not synonymous with “destruction”. It is in fact much closer to the original meaning of the word “analyse”, which etymologically means “undo”. According to J. A. Cuddon, a text can be read as saying something quite different from what it appears to be saying. It may be read as contradictory to what the very text says. Not a single, “stable” meaning. Thus the text may “betray itself”.

These might be termed as “violent hierarchies”. But the result is to find often strikingly new interpretations of texts. Even philosophy seems anew in the light of meticulous reading. No “meaning” is stable, rather the only thing that keeps the sense of unity within a text is what Derrida called the “the metaphysics of Presence”.

The problem with the traditional hermeneutics is the problem of centre. As such, the centre serves to hold the shape of the structure by holding all o its elements together. In holding the shape of the structure the centre limits the amount of what Derrida calls “free play” or the moment of the elements within the system. This lack of ability to play, in philosophical systems ties elements down too strictly and does not provide for the questioning and multiplicity of meaning that is the basis of philosophy.

A great variety is possible in the process of transmutation of emotion. It gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original. In the Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in Othello, to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is the murder of Agamemnon is probable as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements. The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale. Thus the poet has, not a “personality”, to express, but a particular medium. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

Thus we may say that "The Waste Land" is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.

4.2. Impossible Univocal Reading

J. Hillis Miller is an American literary critic who has been heavily influenced by and who has heavily influenced deconstruction. He was associated with the Geneva Group of critics and later with deconstruction. In his seminal essay “The Critic as a Host” he argues, “univocal reading of any text (either poem or novel) is impossible. Every text is a vocalization of a vocalization. If poem has a voice, it is articulated before, and one rearticulates it, reads it with ones own voice”. No two reading can be probably the same even the same reader may read and mean differently.

Every thought is figurative deriving from an image. To imagine especially in poetry is to image. And every image can not be fully expressed. Everything always means something else too (arbitrary nature of sign). This is inherent in the very logic of sign. Signs are not symbols. But here thought and language does have a gap in between. Then how can we claim for univocality?

All the words are spoken before are voiced in various discourses and all contextual and inter-textual references are voices of the voice. Hence a univocal reading would not have imaginative, social or intellectual articulation. And so could not mean at all. For example the term host was originally meant to mean “a stranger”. Again the term “parasite” was originally meant to be “a fellow guest”. Thus we may say that the language is a social and living organism. Meaning can never be fixed. Hence we say that "The Waste Land" can never be reduced to a single or univocal reading and understanding.

Eliot's poetry was first criticized as not being poetry at all. Another criticism has been of his widespread interweaving of quotations from other authors into his work. "Notes on “The Waste Land”," which follows after the poem, gives the source of many of these, but not all. This practice has been defended as a necessary salvaging of tradition in an age of fragmentation, and completely integral to the work, as well adding richness through unexpected juxtaposition. It has also been condemned as showing a lack of originality, and for plagiarism. The prominent critic F. W. Bateson once published an essay called “T. S. Eliot: The Poetry of Pseudo-Learning”. Eliot himself once wrote ("The Sacred Wood"): "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different" (Drew 142).

4.3. The Author and the Text

“No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”(Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). The existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new work of art among them. The difference between the present and the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show. An artist can be judged only be the standards of the past.

One of the facts that might come to light is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In those aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference form his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas, if we approach Eliot with out this prejudice, we shall find that not only the best, but the best individual parts of his work to be subtle. This is the argument put forward by Eliot himself in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”.

4.4. A Less-Useful Search for Background of Eliot

In understanding a work of art, often the background of the poet’s life, his emotional stability or instability is considered so as to understand the mood of the poem. But Eliot says:

It is not his [poet’s] personal emotions, or the emotions provoked by particular events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His particular emotions my be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotions in his poetry will be a very complex things, but not with complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life. (Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

The emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe that the formula of Wordsworth, “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. According to Eliot it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor tranquillity it is a concentration. And a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation.

These experiences are not “recollected”, and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he out to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him, “personal” (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).

Eliot argues, “The mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of personality. Not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more things to say’, but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new combinations. ” (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).

Hence we argue that understanding "The Waste Land" as the aftermath of the poet’s personal feelings would not yield a justifiable and complete interpretation to the text. Rather the complexity, and care which Eliot put in creating "The Waste Land" would yield more meaning. Of course Eliot would have been influenced by his life situation. But the text has more meaning to the present day reader.

4.5. Depersonalisation of Eliot in "The Waste Land"

According to Eliot, the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science. Here comes the analogy of the platinum rod. “Poetry is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”). But of course only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. The poet cannot reach impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he believed in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead but of what is already living.

Eliot had compared the mind of the poet to the shred of platinum. When Oxygen and sulphur dioxide are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged.

The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. The elements which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds; emotions and feelings. (Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

Aristotle has said in his De Anima, “While the intellect is doubtless a thing more divine and is impassive”. Hence passivity of personal experience and the objective understanding of a concept is most important. In "The Waste Land" Eliot has tried to create such an impassive, objective expression. Thus we need to say that one has to divert interest from the poet to the poetry. It would conduce to a juster estimation of "The Waste Land". There are may people who appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know where there is an expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotions of art are impersonal.

Various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever might be composed out of feelings solely.

Hence we conclude that the interpretation of "The Waste Land" as a painful lamentation of the personal troubles underwent by Eliot or that the interpretation of the text is closed only to a singular outlook is may not be correct. This is all the more evident from the very words of Eliot himself.

4.6 Objective Correlative in "The Waste Land"

According to Eliot, the only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “Objective correlative”. In other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. That must be in such a way that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, Eliot gives the example from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of imagined sensory impressions”(Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”)

In "The Waste Land", Eliot tries to evoke a feeling in the reader. Eliot succeeds in creating a particular emotion in the reader. Now the question is whether the poem’s dominant emotion or the experience is that of happiness or desperation? Our argument is that the dominant emotion of Eliot when writing "The Waste Land" might be of desperation or something else. In the present day context and approach to the text, we mean a positive outlook. This is not pasting the readers ideas and forcing an interpretation upon the text, but rather one more vision of the text understood and explained. This is one more hermeneutical pragmatic approach which enriches the meaning.

4.7. The Death of Eliot and the Birth of "The Waste Land"

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a French literary critic, literary and social theorist, philosopher and semiotician. His works extended over many fields and he influenced the development of schools of theory including structuralism and post-structuralism. The 1968 essay, “The Death of the Author”, is a most well-known work which, in the light of the growing influence of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction theory, would prove to be a transitional piece that would investigate the logical ends of structuralist thought.

Like a dethroning of a monarchy, the “Death of the Author” clears space for the multi-voiced populace at large, ushering in the long-awaited “birth of the reader”. To give "The Waste Land" it’s future we need to overthrow the myth. The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author. Hence Eliot and "The Waste Land" is to be separated. Unless the grain of wheat dies it remains the same. But if it dies it yields a rich harvest. Unless we separate Eliot from "The Waste Land" we will have to be satisfied with the univocal understanding of the text. The text being a modernist text, it necessarily invites multiple readings and special efforts on the part of the reader.

In fact only a part of the personalities of the artist can be revealed in the work of art. “They use the logic of memory to reconstruct the past. In remembering the past, they screen out the unpleasant, while retaining their happy memories. That causes some amount of distortion” (Vijayan 228).

4.8. The Reader Response Reading of "The Waste Land"

Eliot echoes some contemporary theorists who believe that a text is animated by the reader and the critic only facilitates the exercise. No text has meaning in itself, but meaning is given by the reader who gives meaning to it. The communication is like an arch in which the text becomes complete only when the particular reader reads it and gives the text its meaning in his context.

Hence understanding "The Waste Land" necessitates a historical critical method. According to Barthes, “As soon as the fact is narrated a disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin. In the air, voice never declares who spoke it but only it speaks itself. It travels, hence writing begins and the author dies. Actually the French Rationalism, the personal faith of Reformation and the Homocentrism emphasised on “Human Person”. They gave the greatest emphasis to the person not the work. Actually, the author also intends not to expose him but only his work. But we who are less intuitive bought histories of authors more, not their works; understood their biographies, not the precious text itself.

Unfortunately even now the study of the author is tyrannically centred around the person, his life and his tastes. Thanks to the writers who yielded their works and did not mention their names.

Mallareme and Proust and the New Criticism has insisted that the language speaks, and not the author. The language knows “a subject”; it does not know a “person”. A person is just an “I”. That is all, nothing less and nothing more. Thus, when we remove the author, the text really becomes transformed into a new entity – a modern text. The author must be absent at all its levels. When we keep the dead body of the author with the text it smells. The author and the book stand on a single line divided into a before and an after.

Chapter 5 The Deconstructed Meaning of the Religious Symbols in "The Waste Land"

Eliot’s poem is a complex and multi-dimensional entity. The necessity of careful study and interpretation is necessitated because of the quality of the text itself. In this chapter we expound the new perspective on "The Waste Land". The conventional meaning of the texts are given a progressive and positive outlook. This is done with developing theological, philosophical and linguistic efforts. It is said that “The Waste Land” projects several levels of modern experience related to various symbolic wastelands, such as those of religion, spirit and the reproductive instinct and that the poem is mainly about the theme of barrenness and infertility. The curse on the land and its master, the Fisher King, is linked to the quest for the Holy Grail. Death, life-in-death, and death-in-life are some of the other themes of the poem. Life devoid of meaning is a kind of spiritual death. Eliot hopes that Eastern philosophy could possibly provide a redeeming alternative to the corruption of the European nations.

This chapter is a positive understanding of generally pessimistically understood religious symbols of "The Waste Land". This chapter is the core and centre of the dissertation. Here we present the precise findings of the research and expounds the work’s central arguments.

5.1. Not the Waste Land - it is a Useful Land

The Upanishads is the key to open the whole text. "The Waste Land" is to be viewed through the window of the Upanishads. Even the fragmentary shots would revolve into a whole. The Upanishads is the crystal that unifies different plates and lights. According to Unger, it appears that Eliot himself was not quite sure about the unity of "The Waste Land", since he had initially wanted to divide it between two issues of the Criterion. Though Eliot drought of it as a "series of poems", Pound persuaded him that the poem should appear as a single sequence. Reading the five parts together is more effective in understanding what the poet says; and the poem is likely to lose its full meaning, if its parts are taken up in isolation.

Hence we might say that the negative terminology which pervades the greater part of the poem does not yield a meaning that is comprehensive. The final part which ends in hope and the terminologies pervades pro-life and sustaining hope is to be considered vital to the wholistic understanding of the poem itself.

Again a text speaks to a context. If there is no context there can be no text. And the text also is given meaning by a specific context. So we need a reader involved reading so as to mean to the present context of the reader and to find the fresh relevance of "The Waste Land".

The unified pattern of "The Waste Land" appears clearly only when we regard it as a single poem of several movements comparable to those of a musical symphony, or to a play of five act. Eliot is of the view that a poet should work out different elements of a poem separately, and then fuse them together to achieve the unity of an artistic whole. The discontinuous tablets of Eliot explain this understanding. Eliot disagrees with the contention of E.A. Poe (American poet and critic) that a long poem is series of short poems strung together. "Poe finds it difficult to write a long poem because he believes it should possess one mood and be without variations of style. Eliot on the other hand, writes a long poem only for the purpose of expressing a variety of moods" (Staffan 89). This requires the bringing together of a number of different moods and themes, which could either be related in themselves or in the mind of the poet, who can visualise and combine together the diverse elements.

According to Eliot, the parts of a poem taken together form a whole which is more that the sum of the parts, and the pleasure that one gets from reading a part is enhanced by his grasp of the whole. This is what he means by the poetic unity of a work of literary art – be it a poem, play or novel.

Hence, all that we want to say is that "The Waste Land" is not a waste land, rather it projects a very “useful” land. A wholistic view reveals that the poem is heading towards an end that is positive. The modernistic text should not be read in linear succession of suggestions, but back and forth mixing of tableaus are to be comprehended and view as a whole. In this sense the text primarily speaks of a peaceful land, a fruitful land and the text is hopefully open to the future. The final refuge in the eastern religious tradition succinctly produces the desired effect. Finally peace reigns.

It is said that Eliot compels the reader to confront the vice of boredom or spiritual emptiness in order to realize how he himself is situated and that after going through "The Waste Land", the reader shares with the poet a state of deep spiritual emptiness, something that the poem projects among several other things. But it is also equally true to say that the poem speaks of the spiritual richness. On the peripheral level it speaks of “death by water”, but on a deeper level it speaks of “life by water”. On the simple level it speaks of decaying and decadence, but on a subtle level decaying nourishes the growing plant. It manures the plant. It speeds up growth. Apparently life seems to give way to death, but inherently the onset of life has already started. It is not a land of death of “dry bones”(Ezech 37, 2), but the same text speaks how the dry bones have come to life (Ezech 37, 10). Not only the breath entered into them, they came to life, they stood up on their feet, and eventually became a great an immense army (Ezech 37,10).

The poetic sensibility never ends in a pathetic, or painful, or desperate note. But the poem ends in a positive, optimistic or hopeful note. Hence the dramatic monologue releases all the tension built up so far in the final section. Moreover it is also possible to read the poem even from the beginning in a positive note.

5.2. Language of Poetry is the Language of Paradox

The very first line of the "The Waste Land", “April is the cruelest month…", reveals a paradoxical meaning. Often the allusion of the text to the Canterbury tales yield an author centered meaning. But allowing the text to speak for itself would give a stronger meaning. The lover who loves his beloved might call his beloved "a thief". Thief might be used in denotation or in connotation. In connotation it can mean the lover is the one who “stole” the heart of the other. The language of poetry is the language of paradox. The greatest statements of religious texts are usually written in paradox. "Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it"; "blessed are the hungry, they shall be satisfied". The concept of Karma and Moksha (liberation) is in fact a dying to self and a merging to the Eternal Self. Krishna speaks about Dharma to Arjuna who is reluctant to fight his own kith and kin. But Lord Krishna advises to fight against so as to fulfil Dharma, as Arjuna is a Shathriya, whose duty is to fight. Fulfilling duty eventually fulfils responsibility. A fight is right. That is the beauty of paradox.

Hence we may interpret the term "the cruellest" as synonym with "the best" month. Eliot says what all have said, but says it in the language of paradox. The argument necessarily speaks against the pessimistic note of the interpretation in favour of an optimistic interpretation. A pleasant mosaic rather than the decaying picture of autumn.

Again Tiresias is not blind. The person of Tiresias is positive. It is generally agreed that the most significant point of view emerging out of the "The Waste Land" is that of its central voice, which is the prophesying voice of Tiresias. All the figures depicted in the Tarot pack of cards symbolically unite in the dominating personage of Tiresias. He is the central consciousness, the various episodes from whose experience make up the poem. He is a "seer" in spite of being physically blind. The very character himself is a symbol of sight. He is blind. And he sees. How is it possible? And what does it say, ultimately? Ultimately the symbol of Tiresias shows that in spite of being blind, he can see. In spite of desperation there is hope. Still hope prevailing. Hoping against hope! Thus the personality of Tiresias himself gives witness to the positive overall note of the poem.

5.3. Not a Land of Infertility but it is a Land of Fertility

Corpse is a symbol of life in Potency. According to Christian faith and theology there is no death. Nor does the Hindu philosophy propagates an annihilation theory. Souls are born and are reborn in the cycle of birth and rebirth until they merge into the Eternal self. The “corpse” must sprout.

Again death by water is not a possibility but life by water is a possibility even by the geological sciences. Death by water or death by flood waters is in the religious mythologies. But water is a sign of life and its source. Hence death can never arise from water. In an inter-disciplinary culture of today, we can very well argue that researchers always hunt for the places where water is present. Where there is water there is life. Moreover in the biblical account of creation in the book of Genesis, water was created first and the Spirit of the Lord hovered over the water. And life came first from water. However, the contrary can be argued contra by saying that the flood narrative can be interpreted as a means of death, namely flood that kills. It can be further developed that the symbolism of flood in the book of Jeremiah speaks of flood in favour of God’s control over the fate of man. Water, in the world of “The Waste Land”, stands for sustenance, healing, and faith, and for the orderly and proper progress of the universe.

Eliot's use of symbolism and water are very evident throughout the entire poem. In the beginning of "The Waste Land", Eliot introduces the fact that water is what the wasteland really needs. Line 20 states, “And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water”, referring to the scripture found in Ecclesiastes. Later on in part five Eliot inserts the lines, "If there were rock and also water …And water …A spring, a pool among the rock … If there were the sound of water only…" Obviously Eliot likes the presence of water and wishes it was present in the wasteland of his life. After understanding the use of water throughout the entire poem, a problem then arises as we see that the death of Phlebas is caused by water. Then, is not water a good thing to Eliot? It is a good thing and we must keep that in the forefront of our minds when interpreting this passage. If water is considered a good thing or something desired, then a death that resulted from it must be considered a good or desirable thing too.

In the Christian practice water is never a source of death. In baptism water symbolises life, rebirth, grace and spirit. The spirit hovers over the baptised as the spirit of the Lord hovered over water in the beginning of time. In the Christian sense, water can never symbolise death. It always symbolised life and hope. When Israelites were thirsty, God sends water from the rock. Here rock symbolises both God and the emptiness, and impossibility. David calls God rock. Rock remains. God remains and his love endures for ever. Also the infinite possibility of God to send water from the rock reveals that everything is possible for God. Thus we may conclude that water is in fact a symbol of life, and a symbol of hope.

Moreover in Hinduism water is one of the basic elements. The basic elements of earth, fire, air, space and water form part of the basic concepts of the universe. They form the life creative principle of Shiva, the Brahma , the ultimate goal of human life and destiny.

In the last and the final section of "The Waste Land”, water comes in the form of falling rain, and provides a refreshing vision of freedom, fecundity and flowering of the soul. The voice of Prajapati (Brahma) in the Upanishad follows in the form of thunder; “Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata”- give, sympathise, control. To sympathise is a kind of giving of oneself, and to control is to discipline and govern. This concluding message is given for saving humanity from its spiritual drought. The poem ends on a note of peace: "Shantih, shantih, shantih"

According to Matthiessen, the poem deals with the contrast of "Two kind of life and two kind of death"(37). Death in life and life in death. Life devoid of meaning is a kind of death, while death in a sacrifice is a renewal of life as it provides hope of life to come. Through all the five sections of "The Waste Land", Eliot explores, at some length, the variations of this paradoxical theme. Along with this he presents through his poetic art the wonderful trinity of religion, culture and sex. A combined ideal of the three concepts taken together ought to be the common goal of humanity, but, since these human impulses tend to work in isolation, we have the resulting corruption of the European civilization. Here the Orient provides an alternative, and that is how "The Waste Land" ends on a message of charity, hope and peace from the Upanishads.

Another important innovation of Eliot is his understanding of time. He was obsessed with the problem of time. He writes in Four Quartets:

“Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past”

"The Waste Land" has an Eastern cyclic time sequence rather than linear sequence. No fragments come one after another but rather all fragments are mixed up and they do defy time and paraphrasing. In fact Einstein understands time as being subjective. Time was considered to be an objective entity. The very fact that Einstein reconstructed the concept and found meaning in a changed concept reveals that reality is not single but many. Human beings always lack the full knowledge and convictions are relative. The relativity is also implied in "The Waste Land". The relativity and difficulties involved in the human intellect, in deciding life’s cause of action. Hence both Christianity and Hinduism speak of the omnipotence of God and the concept of destiny.

5.4. Not lust but gift, not sex but leela and not curse but blessing

Marriage gave Yeats stability and direction but more specifically, the supposedly automatic writing of his wife brought metaphors for poetry, the symbol of the gyre, moon, and mask that became the basis for his philosophical system. But as for Eliot his marriage supplied difficulties, out of which, we might say that “The Waste Land” took shape.

The title of the third part of "The Waste Land" is taken form the Fire Sermon preached by Buddha to convince his followers, the Buddhists, of the negative and evil influence of the human mind of the fires of lust, passion, infatuation and hatred.

But here it is argued that passions are not bad or evil in themselves. They are the most powerful gifts human beings are endowed with. In fact no artistic or creative cognition is possible without the libido energy. The Freudian understanding of sex as a primary drive in human beings is proved beyond doubt. All the intellectuals of humanity were sexually active and progressive. Moreover, according to Christianity the sexual energy is the gift of God. In fact the patriarchal outlook of the book of Genesis contrived the sex as the fruit eaten from the middle of the land (human body) is the cause of death. The Hebrew verb “to eat” also means to have sexual union. However the inferior status given to woman in the bible is not divinely willed, but rather humanly described.

According to Hinduism, each man has to follow the four Ashramas. A person in the household Ashrama, necessarily should go through the sexual or marital life experience. That is why in Kalidasa’s “Abhijanan Sakuntalam” we find the foster father Kanva does not blame Dushanta for having sexual union with Sakuntala in the ashram in his absence. It is because he understands that Dushanta is in the householder ashrama. This experience rather fulfils life and eventually prepares a person for Sanyasa and finally to Vanavasa. Kama Sutra is not a materialistic text. It is a sacred text. And the ancient scholars and sculptors gave it expression in religious terms.

According to Jungian psychology the repressed emotions always come out as dangerous personality disturbances. Emotions are icebergs, only a minimal part is evident. But the deep-rooted basic needs pervade the whole life, behaviour and personality of a person.

"The Fire Sermon" ends with reference to quotations from the teachings of two visionaries, the Buddha of the East and St. Augustine of the West. It is said that both religious philosophers significantly use the imagery of fire to convey their impression of lust. On this point, the wisdom of the East and the West somehow arrives at the same conclusion. But neither the West, nor the East originally sees sex as something negative. Even St. Augustine is not the single voice of the Christian theology. St. Augustine is a saint, but still a man. It was taught by St. Augustine that the original sin is transferred to the children through the sexual act of their parents. This is not the stand of the Christian theology. Having a bitter past of sinful life, St. Augustine always saw sex as something evil, and that it should be avoided. Moreover, in the previous era, the conjugal act, between the couples except for procreation’s sake, was considered to be sinful. But Christianity slowly came to recognize the truth of the “good of the spouses”. That is the conviction that the sexual act between the marital partners in itself is good as it unites the partners’ body and soul. It is an act of goodness that yields satisfaction, health and companionship. It is a moment of god-given miracle. It is even a mystery beyond the understanding of man.

Even the Greek mythical exposition shows that the gods were envious of man and woman. They were united as one being. But out of jealousy over the succinct union and happiness of human being’s togetherness, they cut them into two. Hence the other half is in continual search of the better half. Together they complete the other. It is the sexual union that completes the quest for fullness. Thus, sex, in fact is a blessing a returning to the formal glory and wellbeing.

The last part of section two, which also contrasts with the first section, consists of what may be an overheard conversation in a pub. Two speakers discuss a conversation that one of them previously had, in which this speaker remonstrates another friend, Lil, for her attitude toward sex. In this section, the friend describes the sexual relationship between Lil and her husband Albert, who "wants a good time" after four years in the British army (line 147). It is said that the sexual relationship described here is lacking in both love and passion; Albert only wants a good time, but is displeased with the appearance that Lil's teeth give her. As pointed out before, Lil rejects a part of the life cycle and the natural result of sex, the continuation of the life cycle through the creation of a new life in childbirth. Lil suffers a quicker aging as a result of this rejection. The non-sexual relationship between Lil and Albert is also crystallized by the friend's question of what Lil did with the money. Lil's use of the money, which was perhaps used to pay for the abortion, implies a lack of honesty between the couple. Here again comes the question of sex and children. Sex is not a means of procreation. It is a means of mutual satisfaction, a period of togetherness which transposes a psychological union. The conversation between Lil and Albert in the last passage of section two is said to be random in detail, vulgar in tone, and seemingly unregulated in structure. Again the vulgarity is in the seer. The reader gives meaning to it. An apparently evil act might originally be a good act. The sight of love making by parents- for the immature child might be a cause of great embarrassment, but for a married adult child it is a partaking of a blessing. The same act, seen through different perspectives.

The leela of Lord Krishna is seen as the utmost holy act of God. Leela does not limit human expression. Multiplicity of play is allowed. Derrida’s free play does not limit the text to a single interpretation but keeps the text to a multiple interpretation. Both leela and free play are plays. Moreover the Song of Solomon from the Christian Scriptures sees sexual expression to be the highest form of divine expression. The original text of the Fall does not propagate how humanity came to be corrupted by eating (etymologically sexual union) of the forbidden fruit. Only the patriarchal interpretation placed the blame entirely on the female partner.

Early Christian texts see the Fall of Adam as a fortunate sin. It is fortunate because only because of such a Fall the Saviour could be born. Where there no fall, no necessity of god-made-man. No fall – no Redeemer. A supreme act of love and sacrifice would not have happened. And humanity would lack a god who did not share in human sufferings.

It is said that the prophesying Tarot cards of Madame Sosotris are now used for vulgar fortune telling, which marks the decline of values in the modern European society. Here it should be noted that Eliot makes extensive use of the pack of Tarot cards as a symbolic structural device in "The Waste Land". Vulgarity is not in the very act of sex, it is in the mind of the corrupted person.

In psychology there is an attitude which ordinarily humans exhibit. This is named in psycho-analysis as “projection”. Projection is the result of seeing one’s subconscious in the other. In a projector, usually pictures are seen on the screen. In fact the picture is not upon the screen, but it is in the projector itself. Like wise, in personality, we find people often accusing others of obscenity. In fact it is in the person who makes the comment is the originator of such obscene emotion. In the Bible itself we see David infuriated over the stolen lamb. As king who has to mete out justice, he yells that such a person must be killed and should not be allowed to live in Israel. And the prophet Nathan points the finger at the king David himself and tells that he was the culprit who stole the sheep Bethsaba from Uriah the poor man who owned a cherished sheep, his only possession. In this way too seeing sex as something negative is not originating from the very sight but originates from the innermost recesses of one who sees and judges.

More over sin is never an objective reality, it is a subjective reality. The same vulgar experience can be seen as sutra of life. It is a means of experience of God. Sex has remained a mystery since humanity came to existence. The limited boundaries of moral grounds in favour of the male have always pervaded society even to the extent of the term “weaker sex”. Before God, no sex is weak or strong. God sees man as man woman as woman. Equal in rights and duties.

Again it is said that the two episodes of love in “The Burial of the Dead” are studies in contrast, symbolising the gulf separating the ecstasy of love from the frustration in love. The Hyacinth Girl standing in rain with flowers in her arms is an image of youthful aspiration and passion that is bound to have a tragic end. And that it is how Eliot, the consummate poet, conveys his impression of the frustrations suffered by his contemporary generation. Now the question is who would not find an end that is tragic. All men are mortal. And everyone born necessarily need to die whether he or she experience the ecstasy of love or the frustration of love.

Now a logical question is this. If the discontinuous symbolic picture shows that they are in ecstasy, how can the words mean negative? How can the tone of the dialogue be sensed by the reader? In fact it is supplied in part by the reader too. All the symbols present a picture; it does not present either a positive nor a negative picture of the scene. Once that tone is determined and finalized, the very concept of the poetic composition is proved untrue. Eliot wanted that the poem be a living text, an open text, a text that has multiple meanings. "The Waste Land" is a readerly poem.

One proverb goes like this, “sex must be a sin; see how the parents are punished.” But, bearing the burden of childbirth and the struggle thereafter of parents to bring up their child is not a burden. It might become a burden to a person who sees it as a burden. But it is a fulfilment to look after and cherish ones own children, to many parents. The pangs of birth were interpreted as a “curse” on humanity for eating the forbidden fruit (the fruit which is in the centre of the garden- viz. body). This is the deviation which came in the interpretation of the biblical text. In the Christian understanding suffering is not a curse, rather it is a blessing. It is through suffering that a person becomes a mature person. Smooth roads never make good drivers. Problems are like trees seen through a running train. As you approach them they bully, but once you have passed them over they seem to be becoming smaller and smaller.

Likewise people considered the biblical text “subdue the earth” as a licence to do whatever one pleases to do with the universe. In fact, Bible originally propagates a message of guardianship. Man is the protector; he is the guardian of Ecology. He has to till it, tend it, care for it and receive blessing out of it. He must enjoy the fruit of it. It all happened because of the weakness of the interpretations across the centuries.

5.5. Not A Handful of Dust and Death- But a Vibrant Life in a Hand

The very word Adam, in Hebrew means dust. Dust symbolizes mortality. The finite quality of human life is suggested. But the dust eventually receives life. It is most paradoxical in the Bible that God created everything and said it was good. But only after creating man God said “It is very good”. God judged man to be very good and ironically named him “dust”. It also goes along with the Hindu concept of element “earth”. Only for a peripheral person there is difference. But for mystics there is no difference between religions.

Even though the human body evaporates into the elements, it ultimately lives. It is said that the planting of a corpse in the modern wasteland is not a sacred ritual but its antitheses comparable to the action of a dog first burying and then digging up a bone. The dog digs up the bone in order to prevent it from blossoming into new life. It is obvious that Eliot deliberately uses symbolic and mythical imagery and literary allusions for expressing his deeply thought out meaning. This brought about a well-ordered artistic pattern. It is again said that in Eliot’s poem, the emphasis is on death, and not on the hope of rebirth into a new life. But how can one explain the allusion to the Christian sacrament of baptism, at which the holy water becomes an agent of death of the old self and rebirth of the spirit. A new born in Christ, is central to Christian theology.

A heap of broken images - the crowds flowing over London Bridge - every day, morning and evening, are not independent human beings, but the slavish victims of a mechanical way of life, bereft of the vitality of real living. Crowds represent individual and the individual represents the crowd. All travel. The necessity of passing the bridge between life and death is universal. Tagore considered death as if a child’s cry. When the mother takes the child from one suckling breast to the other, the child objects. But the mother knows that the child would receive more milk in the other breast. Hence passing of time is a necessity. And the passing is a blessing and to a greater existence. Ultimately liberation is possible only there is a bridge between birth and rebirth, and only because there is death, there is the hope of life to come. It is only because there is Chaos there will come a creation. The wasteland is cold, dry, and barren, covered in garbage. Yes, that need to precede life.

The beginning of the Bible speaks of the beginning of creation. The exposition of creation is begun with an exposition of chaos. The chaotic situation eventually brought about new life. Thus, chaos is part of creation. In every religious mythology we find a chaotic wasteland situation before the creation. In fact, the biblical chaotic situation is a symbol. The biblical text reads, “The earth was formless and void” (Genesis1, 2). This is a symbolic expression of the life situation of Israelites themselves after the Babylonian exile-the formlessness and void experienced by the Israelite prisoners. Once the Babylonians invaded Israel, their cherished temple was lost, children, wives, young men and women were brutally killed. Women were raped and killed, young men were captured as slaves and pregnant women were mercilessly cut open and the children in the womb was taken out and killed. No remnant must remain. Israel needs to be annihilated. No land; No temple; and no house. Family is lost, relatives are lost and everything is lost. In this dire situation the war prisoners were asked strip and line up along the river of Babylon. They stood naked. The captors mocked them and asked then to sing a song of Zion (Jerusalem). Then, the youngsters asked their elders, whether there is a God in Israel. Is there God at all? They lamented “By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept, remembering Zion; our captures asked for a song. O how could we sing the song of the Lord on an alien soil?”(Psalms, 137, 1). But the elders did not give up. They said that this earth which was created from the formlessness and void by God and by his power. Hence, surely God lives and that he can make their lives flourish again. The elders assured them that God would certainly create new situations in life for them. Their lives will once again bloom, will live grow.

Finally, we hold that chaos is part of the cycle. It completes the cycle. It is the inevitable part of cycle. A wasteland is a necessity. A chaos is a necessity. Only then, creation or new life is possible. One need not be surprised to find so much of evil in the world. It will be there, and afterwards it will not be there. No oppressive system would ever perpetually reign. Psalm 37, 35-36 reads, “I have seen the wicked overbearing, and towering like a cedar of Lebanon. Again I passed by, and, lo, he was no more; though I sought him, he could not be found”. As winter is replaced by spring and summer; as seasons repeat themselves, wasteland will give way to new plants, flowers and fruits.

5.6. Decaying for the Sake of Living Again

"That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/ Has it begun to sprout?" (lines 71-72). Dying or decaying is one way of being reborn. The Greek vegetation myths have a rich meaning of regeneration. As seasons burry in their bosom the past, the pain, memories, dirt, and death and wait the coming of another season to be born again. Unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains the same. In fact corpse do have a potency to be born again. It does begin to sprout.

“What the Thunder said”, was not only the best part, but the only part that justified the whole poem. In the first part of part V, three themes are introduced: the journey to Emmaus, the approach of the Chapel Perilous, the present decay of Eastern Europe. The disciples do not recognize Christ, just risen from the grave, joins them and explains to them how his death and resurrection were in full accord with the divine plan. The disciples do not recognise Christ until the breaking of the bread, and then Christ disappears from the scene. The approach to the Chapel Perilous is the final stage of the quest for the Holy Graill. The decay of Eastern Europe is a reference to the Red Revolution of Russia under the Czars in November, 1917, with the refugees fleeing to West Europe. None of these themes is resolved in “What the Thunder said”, three journeys merge here but remain inconclusive.

The rock is like the cavity-filled mouth of the mountain that does not spite or yield any water. This is no place to rest and refresh oneself. The dry mountains are not silent but echoing with the sound of rainless thunder. There is not even the solace of solitude. So what the narrator of the poem repeatedly asks for is only some water without rock, and , if that were not possible, let it be rock with a little water. He desperately craves for a spring, a pool among the rocks. Above all sounds, he cares for the sound of water flowing over a rock, surrounded by the pine trees and the song of the hermit-thrush. But, unfortunately, his eager ears do not hear the “drip, drop drip drop” sound of water. This shows how the world is devoid of spiritual consolation.

The thunder said DA. The thunder repeats rapidly DA DA DA. A sound effect is created. The thunder is the first sign of life. It carries light, it carries energy and it carries a voice, and it expounds power. The thunder is the way in which God spoke to man in the religious context. Thunder had always been a sign of God; even God himself in Hinduism. Finally, God spoke and man needs to be silent. After a violent voice, there comes calm. Peace. After the storm comes peace. The poem ends in peace not in disquiet or disturbance. Serenity reigns! In the biblical context also there presence of god in the 2 Kings is experienced by Elijah after the thunder in the still small wind.

However we do agree that Eliot’s original intention was to show a wasteland, but we do subscribe that the author has lost his personality in the text, and that the author and the text is separated at the time of the birth of the text. No more umbilical code attached to the author. The text lives separately apart from the mother and becomes a new entity. A living organism across centuries, open to the timeless future and to the tireless scholar.

Conclusion

Symbolism may refer to a way of choosing representative signifiers which are abstract rather than literal. Religious symbols are rather more connotative and abstract than literary symbols. Symbolism, hence, is an important aspect of religions. Symbolists believe that art should aim to capture more absolute truths which could only be accessed by indirect methods. Thus, they wrote in a highly metaphorical and suggestive manner, endowing particular images or objects with symbolic meaning. As far as religion is concerned, trying to describe God is an exercise in futility. God cannot be defined. He can only be represented. And representation is too limited. Thus the Hindu concept of Neti, Neti, Neti (Not this) is most meaningful. When symbols represent God as this, this or this – paradoxically it also means that it is not this, not this, nor this. Thus the deconstructing scholar might ask. Is this? The answer would be yes, but no. A paradoxical answer that is true. A reality that has myriads of forms. No single form is complete. But each form is true in its own specific context.

The Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37 surveys the haunting remains of a massive carnage. With Ezekiel all readers behold an arid landscape, littered with skeletal remains, blasted by gusting winds; a site without a sign of life. But ultimately the valley of dry bones becomes a huge army full of energy, emanating power, activity and life. Hence, eventually it is not the picture of spiritual depression but rather it is the picture of spiritual regeneration. Unless the grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies it remains a single grain. But if it falls and dies, it yields a rich harvest. Hence wasteland is the manure from where the life returns time after time and seasons after seasons in varied forms. With out a decaying seed no new life possible. Without a decaying but no nourishment to any plant is possible.

Thus, we might interpret Eliot’s religious symbols as discontinuous mosaics of morally degenerated humanity. But that would be just one way of looking at it. The twenty-first century waste land is not a wasteland but is a useful land where life hides, but does not die out. The twenty-fist century has a developed moral consciousness and scholarship equipped to dwell deep into the world famous poem of Eliot. A deeper understanding of the Scriptures and the Upanishad have come in, with the help of which we can read the poem in an entirely new perspective. The negative attitude towards the sexual and fertility symbols no longer are valid and in tune with the good God who gave them. Though there existed skepticism against the sexual act as “sinful”, “carnal” and even “evil” now they are viewed as God’s greatest gift to humanity and is seen as life sustaining. The Hebrew word for eat is the same root for sexual union. It was mistakenly interpreted as being the cause of human death, and sinfulness. Together with it, the patriarchal interpretations brought in all the blame on the female sex. In fact, the deeper religious concepts of Hinduism and Christianity have a thoroughly positive attitude. The present day theology suggests that even the world may seem to be filled with evil still God is in control and everything happens only according to the plan of God. Even when Pharaoh hardens the heart, the biblical author says it is not he who hardened the heart but rather Yahweh hardened his heart. Still God is in control, and not man. Amidst the chaos which is experienced in the beginning, it is the creative Word (OUM) which reshapes the chaos into creation. Hence a Waste Land is necessary to create a new land. A land which give birth to a new land is a prerequisite and in fact a blessing. Only when there is clay, a pot can be made possible. It is not a “waste” land but is the most “useful” land. There is nothing evil in the world. Evil in itself has no existence. Evil is defined as “absence of good”. Darkness does not exist. Only light exists. The absence of light is called darkness. The Gita Upadesa calls for fulfilling one’s duty. For Arjuna, killing of the kith and kin is an evil, where as for Lord Krishna, it is his duty as he is a Skshatriya, whose duty is to fight. After all, liberation comes at last after the cycle of birth and death. In fact death is good. Death gives an opportunity of rebirth or liberation. Reality is one. Atvaida. There is no duality. All are one. Man comes from God- the Paramatma and he returns back to God himself. Hence Shanti Shanti Shanti.

Each word exists in a complex web of language and gives rise to a variety of denotations and connotations making it impossible to arrive at a final meaning. Signification, according to Derrida is unstable and indeterminate. Hence we are less concerned with establishing a firm and final meaning than with showing the elusive nature of the text and stressing the inderminacy of all texts and the inadequacy of all readings. The result is that we find strikingly new interpretations of "The Waste Land". Even philosophy seems anew in the light of meticulous reading. The problem with the traditional hermeneutics is the problem of centre. As such, the centre serves to hold the shape of the structure by holding all its elements together. In holding the shape of the structure the centre limits the amount of what Derrida calls “free play”. The linear interpretation and building up of the poetic tension is avoided and the text is read back and forth. Slides after slides the picture evolves to make a particular situation of mind in the reader.

Together with this, we do not try to find the poet in the text. The poet has, not a “personality”, to express, but a particular medium. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may have no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poems may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality. According to Eliot, the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. Thus, we may say that "The Waste Land" is not a turning loose of Eliot’s emotions, but an escape from Eliot. It is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. Hence reading "The Waste Land" against the authorial intention does indeed do justice to the richness of the text. Meaning can never be fixed. And meaning is given not by the author but by the reader. Thus the text is to be interpreted historically and pragmatically against the present day context. Since the context of the reader infinitely changes, free play is possible. Hence one can say that "The Waste Land" can never be reduced to a single or univocal reading and understanding. Eliot and "The Waste Land" are to be separated. Unless the grain of wheat dies it remains the same. But if it dies it yield a rich harvest. Unless and until we separate Eliot from "The Waste Land" we will have to be satisfied with the univocal understanding of the text. The text being a modernist text, it necessarily invites multiple readings and special efforts on the part of the reader. A text is animated by the reader and the critic only facilitates the exercise. "Notes on ‘The Waste Land’, which follows after the poem, gives the source of many of these, but not all. The readers have to find them out time after time. Eliot himself wrote in "The Sacred Wood", "Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different" (qtd in Drew 142).

Select Bibliography

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[1] In fact, American poetry remained always more innovative and intellectually challenging. The forties, for instance, saw the emergence of a new generation of poets in America whose influence extended fruitfully to the British poets of the Sixties.

[2] The Upanishads is part of the Vedas. They form the Hindu Scriptures which primarily discuss philosophy, meditation, and the nature of God; they form the core of spiritual thought of Vedantic Hinduism. Considered as mystical or spiritual contemplations of the Vedas, their putative end and essence, the Upanishads are known as Vedānta ("the end/culmination of the Vedas"). The Upanishads were composed over several centuries. The oldest, such as the Brhadaranyaka and Chandogya Upanishads, have been dated to around the eighth century BCE. These philosophical and meditative tracts form the backbone of Hindu thought.

[3] This might have derived from the Celtic legends describing the Grail as a cauldron of rebirth which allowed resurrection to warriors killed in battle but did not allow them to speak of the experience of rebirth - a pattern into which the story of Lazarus roughly falls.

[4] In Eschenbach's Parsifal, the Grail is described as a gem struck from the crown of Lucifer when he was ejected from Heaven.

[5] Eliot's first marriage from 1915 with the ballet-dancer Vivian turned out to be unhappy. She was temperamental, full of life, restless. Her arrival at menstruation brought extreme mood swings, pains and cramps; her condition was diagnosed as hysteria. From 1930 until her death in 1947she was confined in mental institutions. Eliot avoided sharing bed with Vivienne, who started an affair with Bertrand Russell. Virginia Woolf once said: "He was one of those poets who live by scratching, and his wife was his itch." After a physical and mental breakdown in 1921, Eliot went to Lausanne for treatment. There he completed “The Waste Land” (1922), a poetic exploration of soul's - or civilization's - struggle for regeneration.

[6] The cup used by Christ at the last supper with his twelve original disciples before his crucifixion

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Religious Symbolisms in T.S. Eliot’s

"The Waste Land."A Post-Modern Reading

This is a dissertation written by - Fr. John Britto OCD one of my best students

Contents

Modernism and Religious Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

2.4. Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

2.4.2. Symbolism in Literature

2.5 Religious Symbolism in "The Waste Land"

A Post-Structuralist Understanding of "The Waste Land"

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