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
Introduction
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 17th and 18th 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.
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?
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 20th 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.
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.
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 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
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).
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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
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