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ОглавлениеCHAPTER 1
“Shall I at least set my lands in order?”:
Post-War Mythopoeia in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
I
When attempting a myth-critical analysis of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, “the most famous use of anthropology in modernist literature” (Manganaro 79), it seems practical to follow the author’s advice and go back to the critical sources that he identifies as fundamental references for understanding how myth operates in the poem. These are Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend From Ritual to Romance (1920) and James George Frazer’s wide-ranging anthropological study The Golden Bough (1890) (Eliot TWL 21).1 Of course, critics have agreed over the decades that the influence of Weston’s book was somewhat limited in the actual composition of the poem.2 Yet, it is reasonable to argue that the choice of the ‘waste land’ as governing metaphor in the poem may have been influenced by Weston after all, serving as “a structural or guiding model for [the] poem” and not as a clue to “reveal a hidden meaning” (Ullyot 48). Significantly, as Ullyot explains, Weston implicitly argues that “the very wholeness of medieval romance is the symptom of the loss of (…) ritual” (49), which is a fundamental topic in Eliot’s poem. Simultaneously, as also noted by Ullyot, Weston suggests that “scholars must focus on the story of the Waste Land and the wounded Fisher King in the Grail romances rather than on the story of the hero’s quest” (49), for it is the terre gaste that holds the core meaning of the Grail myth.3
As Arthurian experts Lupack and Lupack note, Eliot probably recalled this centrality of the wasteland and of its need for restoration as a unifying motif of the Grail legend (114-15). This may explain the “structural and methodological” indebtedness to Weston (Ullyot 48) of a poem in which references to the Waste Land myth, shaped in different ways, provide a discontinuous rhythm to a great complexity of mythical, religious, historical, and literary allusions. Notoriously, F. R. Leavis once claimed that “a poem that is to contain all myths cannot construct itself upon one” (92). Indeed, The Waste Land is not construed solely upon a single myth, but it does juxtapose unsettlingly “clipped fragments” (Longenbach “Radical” 452) that do not feel coherent due to narrative continuity or dramatic situation, but “because of a swiftly established certainty of tone” (452) that is eloquently expressed in the guiding elements that make up the Waste Land myth: the theme of illness, the topics of sterility and sexual impotence, the narrative structure of the quest, the trope of the king’s sacrificial death, the cyclical movement of the seasons, and the communal longing for regeneration. Moreover, Weston’s myth-ritualist perspective offers a representational advantage since the claim that every rite of sacrifice inheres to the later myth allows for a presentation of ritual as an embodiment of myth.4 In effect, this reverses the loss of ritual that produced medieval romance, which in effect constitutes a remaking of pre-modern myth much in line with modernist mythopoeia.
A distinguishable feature in the representation of the myth of the Waste Land in Eliot’s poem are the various Maimed-King figures that often take the shape of several incarnations of the divine king who, according to Weston, “hovers in the shadowy background” of our history (62). The Fisher King is “a romantic version” of this “divine or semi-divine ruler, at once god and King, upon whose life, and unimpaired vitality, the existence of his land and people directly depends” (62). He is not an archetype for every character in the poem, nor does he articulates, as an individual self, the many voices in the poem.5 He is, however, a paradigmatic model for a high number of characters. The Waste Land is, after all, the consequence of the Fisher King’s injury, and thus he must be either healed or successfully succeeded after a sacrificial death so that the Waste Land can be restored.6 Both scenarios are repeatedly represented in the poem, and both are portrayed as ultimately futile. Perhaps, since succession stories are better established throughout tradition, scenes of sacrificial killings are also more numerous in The Waste Land. Victims such as the Phoenician sailor in “Death by Water,” Jesus Christ in “What the Thunder Said,” or Stetson’s corpse in “The Burial of the Dead” are only the most well-known among several examples of “the same mythic impulse toward insuring the fertility of the earth by ritualistically killing heroes and kings” (Brooker and Bentley 67). The impulse is, however, entirely moot.
The myth, reshaped and rewritten, is transformed from a myth of regeneration to a myth of degeneration. Such degenerative reinterpretation is carried out mostly by a multiplication of symbols that are progressively more and more ambivalent and unreliable. Segal claims that, while “myth is commonly taken to be words, often in the form of a story,” myth-ritualism remakes it so it “does not stand by itself but is tied to ritual” (Myth 61). Myth becomes an action, necessarily transcendent; it encodes the magical meaning to warrant the survival of the community. It has a social purpose. It supplies “a structure of values” (Litz 6). It holds the community together and ensures its proper functioning. Yet, if the myth of regeneration that secures communal survival is transformed, rewritten as a myth of degeneration, its magical meaning is upended: the myth will no longer redeem the community but enact its dissolution.
II
In The Waste Land, “the thematics and imagery of the war underlie the poem at many levels, beginning with its memorial opening and encompassing its burning cities, soldier songs, shell-shocked London citizenry, ubiquitous dead, burial phobias, even the rats” (Cole 66). The possibility of regeneration seems farfetched, even when the land is physically reborn. Whereas in the medieval sources, the physical renewal of the land’s fertility brought along the restoration of peace and social welfare, the earth coming back to life in spring is an act of cruelty in the modern Waste Land. The undertone is apocalyptic: the earth regenerates and will continue to do so for the rest of eternity, but eternal life is the utmost form of cruelty for the war-ravaged, wasted world that remains:
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers. (1-7)
In her fundamental study on violence and modernism, Sarah Cole finds in these iconic lines “multiple valences on the way death and land conjure one another, including the vegetative structure of resurrection” (71). She writes that “the lines invoke the parched earth which nevertheless will breed, the land impregnated by dead bodies (no-man’s-land made general), and the cruel discomfort and pain of bringing blossoms out of such a soil” (71). As she claims, the beginning of the poem ties the loss and death of the Great War to the inevitable cycling of the seasons, which is poignant as far as the horror of war cannot in this way be altered or avoided (71).
For Cole, the beginning of the poem ironizes “the truism that the violence of war can be germinative” (72), which clearly undercuts the magical potency of the alleged ritual of resurrection that underscores the use of myth in the poem. In his famous 1923 review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot seemed to clearly advocate for the benefit of myth as a strategy to give order and meaning to the chaos of the contemporary world,7 and, as some critics have argued, the use of myth in the poem may provide some sense of order—or at least the illusion of order.8 But, in any case, the argument that primitive myth can restore order and meaning in a world wracked by chaos disregards the fact that to complete such purpose, myth has to be reshaped. It is the case in The Waste Land, a poem that “treats myth, history, art and religion as subject to the same fragmentation, appropriation, and degradation as modern life” (Davidson 123). Eliot himself critiqued Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du Printemps (1913) because it remained “a pageant of primitive culture” in which, in everything except in the music, “one missed the sense of the present” (qt. in Litz 19). The words reveal that, for Eliot, the contemporary recreation of myth requires myth to be updated and transformed to give a good account of the present.
Langbaum has argued that all the characters in The Waste Land have in common “a sense of loss and a neural itch, a restless, inchoate desire to recover what has been lost” (“Walking” 231). For Faulk, the poem makes “desperate efforts to reestablish cultural hierarchy out of anarchy by means of a perspective achieved through a poetic arrangement of disparate ‘fragments’” (36). It is the particular arrangement of the fragments that expresses the futility of such a desire for recovery, that “very minimum of restless aliveness” that propels the characters to repeat the archetypal pattern of the Grail quest (Langbaum “Walking” 231). By the time the speaker reaches the Chapel Perilous, the place is empty and poses no threat: “There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home, / It has no windows, and the door swings, / Dry bones can harm no one” (Eliot TWL 388-90). As Lupack and Lupack explain, “with the Chapel divested of its dangers and trials, there is no chance for a hero to prove his courage and virtue, and thus to prove himself worthy of achieving the Grail—if there were a hero, that is” (117). The fragments are barely recognizable, even when the visit to the Chapel is followed by “the dry sterile thunder” (342) finally bringing down the much-awaited rain.
A different sound accompanies the rain. It is a single syllable, DA. Interpreted by the gods as meaning “damyatta” (control), by the men as “Datta” (give), and by the demons as “dayadhvam”(pity), the voice of the thunder as heard in the Upanishad, the sacred books of Hinduism, may suggest a form of redemptive knowledge acquired by the Grail Knight at the end of the quest.9 But such knowledge, if it exists at all, is necessarily polysemic and ambivalent. It raises the problem of interpretation, what Coyle terms “overdetermination,” “liminality,” and “doubleness” (160), in his view the main characteristics of a poem that “inhabits both sides of an opposition” (160).
“What the Thunder Said” begins with the description of a desert—“Here is no water but only rock / Rock and water and the sandy road / The road winding among the mountains above / Which are mountains of rock without water” (Eliot TWL 331-4)—that is finally relieved by the rain. The hopes for regeneration seem corroborated by the presence of resurrected Christ in this fifth canto, in a vignette that recalls the story of the two men on the road to Emmaus:
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you? (359-365)
These lines apparently resolve the first lines of the section, which seem to recreate the Passion,10 poeticizing a transition from death to resurrection. Yet, as Eliot explains in a note, the lines that retell an episode from the Gospel were inspired by the narrative of an Antarctic expedition in which “it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member that could actually be counted” (25).11 Both references simultaneously embody a manifest Providence but, while Shackleton claims that they “had seen God in his caramel raptures, [and] heard the text that Nature renders [and] (…) reached the naked soul of man” (226), Eliot characterizes such apparition as “a constant delusion,” doubling the meaning of a reference that simultaneously signifies redemption and exhaustion. In this regard, the debilitated stream of consciousness of the speaker before the apparition is highly eloquent:
If there was water
And not rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
To pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass signing. (Eliot TWL 346-54)
The faltering rhythm of these short lines, the inconsistent discourse, and the frequent repetitions recall a nearly-exhausted state of consciousness, which resignifies the apparition of Christ into a hallucination suffered by the dehydrated explorers who wander the Waste Land. The doubled image points towards the inevitable failure of heroic action in The Waste Land,12 and at the same time, negates the possibility of resurrection. If Christ’s redemptive sacrifice is a hallucination, the ritual meaning underneath the myth is emptied out of meaning. The killing of the divine king can no longer resurrect the Waste Land because, as Brooker and Bentley note, “Christ, all the heroes of fertility myth, the tradition of revering such figures, and mythic consciousness itself seem to be dead in the reverberation of spring thunder over distant mountains” (174).
This is the fate of ritual and transcendence in the poem, and it is the effect of these ‘doubleness’ of references. As Coyle argues, “both interpretations need to be there, each destabilizing even as it implies the other” (160). Tarot is another example. Weston discussed, its original use had been “to predict the rise and fall of the waters which brought fertility to the land” (80). In Weston’s hypothesis, the four suits of Tarot—Cup, Lance, Sword, and Pentangle (Dish)—correspond with the Grail myth’s central symbols, that is, the Cup, the Lance, the Dish, and the Sword (79). These symbols conform “a group of ‘Fertility’ symbols, connected with a very ancient ritual, of which fragmentary survivals alone have been preserved to us” (80). Those fragments of ritual are collected in The Waste Land, and presented as dramatizing the conflict between modern trivialization and ancient mysticism (Brooks 209). If in Antiquity, the Tarot was used to predict the water rising in springtime, in Eliot’s poem, the fortune-teller Madame Sosostris also heralds the coming of the waters. But in the contemporary, death-ridden world of The Waste Land, the rising waters do not bring along the land’s fertilization but a catastrophic flood. Madame Sosostris cautions the reader to “fear death by water” (55), transforming the announcement of regeneration into an admonition for danger. Brooks argued that “the ‘fortune-telling’ which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience becomes true as the poem develops” (207). This is explained by the cards that Madame Sosostris reveals in the first canto:
…Here, said she,
Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,
(Those are pearls that were his eyes, Look!)
Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,
The lady of situations,
Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,
And there is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,
Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,
Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find
The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. (46-54)
The cards are not real Tarot cards, a sign that the ritual has lost the power of ancient mysticism. And yet, the seemingly ludicrous set effectively predicts the characters and events that the reader will find along the poem. Eliot explains in a note:
I am not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack of cards, from which I have obviously departed to suit my own convenience. The Hanged Man,13 a member of the traditional pack, fits my purpose in two ways: because he is associated in my mind with the Hanged God of Frazer, and because I associate him with the hooded figure in the passage of the disciples to Emmaus in Part V The Phoenician Sailor and the Merchant appear later; also the ‘crowds of people,’ and Death by Water is executed in Part IV. The Man with Three Staves (an authentic member of the Tarot pack) I associate, quite arbitrarily, with the Fisher King himself. (Eliot TWL 22)
The Tarot characters are then the characters of the poem, all of whom are presented as multiple representations of the same mythical archetypes. As Eliot explains in a different note, the Merchant “melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples” (23). That is why the leitmotif extracted from Shakespeare’s The Tempest—“Those are pearls that were his eyes”—follows the apparition of the Phoenician Sailor in Madam Sosostris’s pack. By the time the reader reaches the poem’s ending, all the made-up cards have appeared recurrently. The fortuneteller’s predictions have unexpectedly been fulfilled, and consequently, the reader cannot but trust her warning and distrust the rising of the waters. False becomes true, and meaning arises from how the poem invites contradictory interpretations (Coyle 160).14 Expectations of rebirth arise, and the Tarot regains its ritual force, but this has gone dark: the cards can only predict the annihilating flood.
III
The resignification of ritual in The Waste Land is inextricable from the reshaping of the mode of romance in the poem. As argued, Eliot’s indebtedness to Weston is not mainly the borrowing of a set of symbols from the Grail legend, but how the poem relies on Weston’s argument about the loss of ritual in medieval romance. In Eliot’s poem, the elusiveness of a quest pattern—for the poem uses myth as a “non-narrative” device (Mangamaro 81)15—certifies the dissolution of romance, now the broken carcass of an empty ritual. The consciousness of the modern hero has shattered, and this is a consequence of the fracture of myth, that is, the rapture of the “Apolline illusion” (Nietzsche Tragedy 102) that prevents the “negation of individual existence” (100) when the individual approaches a purely Dionysiac experience of reality. Nietzsche explains myth—“myth, as symbol” (101)—by giving account of his function in Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde (1865). As he argues, the perception of the third act of the opera “purely as a vast symphonic movement, with no assistance from words or images” (100) would shatter the consciousness of the individual, “having once put their ear to the heart of the universal Will, so to speak, and felt the raging desire for existence pour forth into all the arteries of the world as a thundering torrent or as the finest spray of a stream” (100-101). But consciousness is saved thanks to the “assistance from words or images;” that is, by the sudden interposition of myth. This is the power of the Apolline, of myth, “the healing balm of a blissful deception” (101). Words interfere when Tristam speaks, “and what had seemed to us earlier like some hollow sigh from the centre of being now tells us only how ‘barren and empty is the sea’” (101). The words are the myth that shelters consciousness, but out of their operatic context, extracted by Eliot, they become in The Waste Land one more fragment of a broken myth. They are interposed as the feeble remains of an old Apollonian illusion that futilely attempts to arrest the dissolution of the speaker’s fractured consciousness:
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence. /
Öd’ und leer das Meer. (38-42)
The loss of myth entails the shattering of consciousness because a mythical apprehension of the world represents “the struggle of the individual to sustain an illusion of self that can withstand the disturbing force of the Dionysian realm of consciousness” (Mallen 29). The necessary pulling apart of primitive myth in The Waste Land begins to dissolve that illusion, as it can barely hold up the consciousness of the “neither living nor dead” wanderers of the modern Waste Land. Myth intervenes, again and again, attempts to set order and provide comprehensible meaning, but it intervenes after it has been broken, in the shape of fragments shored against the ruins (TWL 430).
As previously mentioned, the fragment of pre-modern mythology found most frequently in the poem is the Fisher King. Of the many Fisher-King figures, one of the most significant is the Phoenician sailor, whose death by water in the very short fourth canto could suggest a redemptive, purifying passing if one disregards Madame Sosostris’s warning. His death is foretold in the fortune-teller’s divination. His card is immediately followed by the leitmotif “Those are pearls that were his eyes” (47-48) that connects the Phoenician Sailor with Shakespeare’s Ferdinand.16 Traditionally, Ariel’s song in The Tempest has been thought to signify that Alonso’s death constitutes “a portal into the realm of the rich and strange—a death which becomes a sort of birth” (Brooks 194). From this perspective, the death of Phlebas may be considered redemptive, a recreation of the vegetation god’s regenerative death that is meant to bring about the restoration of the land’s fertility.17 But again, expectations of regeneration are thwarted when the Phoenician sailor merges into a different character, Mr. Eugenides, the merchant from Smyrna—an identification explained by Eliot in a note (23). The correspondence between both characters is not random. According to Weston’s research, Syrian merchants introduced in Europe the esoteric mysteries she establishes as a Grail legend source (169).18 However, in the poem, such a mystical exchange is replaced by a careless sexual offer when the eastern merchant asks the speaker “in demotic French / To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel / followed by a weekend at the Metropole” (TWL 212-214). As it happened with the hooded figure in “What the Thunder Said, the “overdetermination” (Coyle 160) of the Phoenician sailor as embodying Adonis, Mr. Eugenides, Ferdinand, and Alonso, undermines the assumption that his death by water brings along redemption. This perspective seems to corroborate Zimbardo’s argument that Ariel’s song, expressing Alonso’s transformation through death into something beautiful and durable, does not celebrate “[a process] of regeneration into something more nobly human” (55) but a transfixion of the human “into a rich permanence, but a lifeless one” (55).19
Ariel’s song also appears in “A Game of Chess,” completing a scene of frustration and neurasthenia in which a man and a woman are unable to communicate. Shakespeare’s line interweaves with the anguished thoughts of a distraught character—“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” (Eliot TWL 126)—who is trapped in a decomposing, putrefying environment: “I think we are in rats’ alley / where the dead men lost their bones” (115-6). The scene “offers a stark examination of post-war traumatic shock and its destructive effects upon intimate relationships” (Badenhausen 149), which, along with the echo of Ariel’s song, perpetuates the lifeless atmosphere of the scene that opens this second canto, where life is petrified around Queen Cleopatra. She sits on her throne while around her, “all things deny nature” (Kenner 132). The materials seem to come to life while she remains “savagely still” (TWL 110), trapped between desire and paralysis, as the iconic “dull roots [stirred] with spring rain” (4) at the beginning of the poem. While she combs her hair, Cleopatra listens attentively to the sound of footsteps on the stairs; but the expectation of a sexual encounter is arrested till the next canto. The Queen merges into the young typist, who, after the departure of her lover, “paces about her room again, alone, / (…) smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / and puts a record on the gramophone” (254-6). The parallelism between the two scenes and characters suggests that the sexual encounter, violent and indifferent at the same time, has done little to relieve the Queen’s tension. In fact, it has aggravated the paralysis. As Brooker and Bentley argued, the images that frame the scene in “The Fire Sermon” (the human engine as a taxi, and the typist’s arm as part of gramophone) identify the typist with an automaton. Simultaneously, the clerk is presented as an animal with “an itch that requires scratching” (123). For Brooks, the scene represented a world where “lust drives forward urgently and scientifically to the immediate extirpation of the desire (…) [and] defeats its own ends” (Brooks 193). For Brooker and Bentley, the section “is a dramatization not of lust but of the absence of lust” (123). Yet, whether lust defeats its own purpose or remains unattainable in a context of dehumanization, it seems clear that both inanimateness and lust are the specific shapes of the sexual violence enacted upon the female body in the poem (Scully 176). As the typist “automatic hand / (…) puts a record on the gramophone” (TWL 255-256), she morphs into a sort of bionic Philomela. But while Mcvey argues that Philomela’s violent transformation into a nightingale is displaced into the gramophone singing the song in her stead (83), it is crucial to bear in mind that Philomela cannot speak, so only her voiceless “jug, jug” (TWL 103, 204) resonates here and there in the poem. The scene of the clerk and “assault[ing] at once” the typist (239) may represent the cultural malaise of “undesire” (Mcvey 83), but violence is visibly simmering beneath boredom and frustration. Philomela told the story of her rape by weaving a tapestry because Tereus had cut off her tongue. The iconic representation is displayed in Cleopatra’s throne room in “A Game of Chess,” showcasing how rape and mutilation are “enchanted into art” (Cole 79). Yet, the poem is not complacent. As Cole argued, The Waste Land may recognize the symbolic and cultural potency of violence, but it “recoils from the brutality that sustains that edifice” (67). The sexual palette of the poem is made of “corruption, indifference, disappointment, violence” and of bodies that are “mere collections of parts” (Query 355).
The violent clerk, an incarnation of Tereus insofar as the typist may embody Philomela, is carbuncular, sick. For Lupack and Lupack, his sickness alludes to the castrating wound of the Fisher King (116), which establishes dehumanized sexuality as another form of malfunction that acquires a mythical dimension. Violence is another shape of the wound, and the sick, animalistic clerk is a different personification of the same archetype. Whether motivated by violence or barrenness, life and love are equally sterile in the poem. As Kenner noted, the King is invisible in “A Game of Chess” (131), but the weak, immobile king of chess is no different from Tereus. Lil’s husband is coming home from war and, after four years in the army, “he wants a good time” (TWL 148). Toothless and looking antique at thirty-one, Lil has little to hope for. She has “never been the same” (161) after taking some pills to terminate her sixth pregnancy; she had had five children already, and the fifth one almost killed her. The prospect of her husband coming home threatens her life. There is no alternative. Violence and sickness take many shapes: indifference, frustration, isolation. But regardless of the specific symptoms of sexual and affective dysfunction, love and desire are irrevocably doomed to failure as generative forces of life.
IV
Sarah Cole, in her theoretical categorization of enchanted and disenchanted violence, claims that war is the phenomenon that most powerfully calls for a dichotomized understanding of violent death as either “a sign and precipitator of sublimity” or “a sign and precipitator of total degeneration and waste” (39). In The Waste Land, this double understanding is sustained because of how the enchantment of myth attempts to detain modernity’s disenchantment. Cole follows Weber to explain how rationalism, materialism, and the institutionalization of life take the place of sacredness and spiritually (40). This results in a “denuding of the magical” (41) that is somehow resisted towards the end of the nineteenth-century in the primitivism and anthropology—Frazer and Weston are clear examples—that enchant ritual violence to recognize its transformative power (42).20 Myth-ritualism, and more specifically, the conception of myth advanced by this school of thought, is a clear example of enchanted violence. In Eliot’s poem, this enchantment violence is directly confronted with the harsh reality of another paradigm of generative violence: war and its transformation of violent death into “something positive, communal, perhaps even sacred” (44). According to Cole’s thesis, The Waste Land treads the fine line between enchantment and disenchantment, not clearly opting for one single understanding of violence, executing a “balancing act” and trading on the power of violence instead, “at times appropriating its force and creating something especially brilliant, at other times succumbing to the sheer ruin that violence leaves in its wake” (81). Badenhausen, on the contrary, believes that the poem “is tipped far more toward disenchantment than enchantment,” as it is a poem “distressed by violence but not redeemed by the artistic project that underlies it” (149). This study concurs but goes one step further. The representation of violence in the poem—or rather, as Badenhause very well notices, the representation of the aftermath of violence (147)—does not simply carry out a disenchantment of violent death but realizes a disenchantment of myth itself.
The Waste Land opens with a passage that Armin Paul Frank defined as “the ‘root’ consciousness vignette” (43), which is revealed as uttering the consciousness of the dead bodies buried underground at the end of the first canto. The mythical Waste Land takes here the shape of a real, historical wasteland holding within a generation of corpses, killed too soon, violently massacred. Towards the end of “The Burial of the Dead,” amid this literal wasteland, the speaker meets a fellow soldier:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson!
‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden,
‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?
‘Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?
Oh keep the Dog far hence, that’s friend to men,
‘Or with his nails he’ll dig it up again! (TWL 69-75)
These are the war survivors, plucked from the land, and incapable of putting down roots themselves, planting corpses instead. Langbaum saw in the speaker’s questions “a shocking substitution of ‘corpse’ for ‘seed [that]’ reminds us that the corpses are a kind of seed, and that this truth was symbolized in the old vegetation rituals” (“Characterization” 102). But, as Brooker and Bentley noticed, such rituals are unimaginable to Stetson and the speaker. For them, the two characters have asked themselves the question, “‘how can a dead man, whether he was god, hero, or peasant, restore fertility to the land?’ and come up with the same answer: “The only way for a dead man to restore fertility to a garden is for him to remain buried in that garden. He can there decompose and serve as fertilizer” (36). This is a clear instance of disenchantment. It is a “grotesque process of literalization” (Brooker and Bradley 36) that once again certifies the collapse of the symbolic parameters of romance in a world where “the transcendent either does not exist or is irrelevant” (59). But the disenchantment is a consequence of violence. The speaker recognizes Stetson among the ghostly crowd that flows over the “unreal city” (TWL 60), as he reflects on how he “had not thought death had undone so many” (Eliot TWL 61-2). Stetson, like the speaker, is a ghost. They are floating in Limbo and simultaneously waiting at the Gates of Hell.21 They are no more alive than the corpse planted in Stetson’s garden. As Bonikowski writes about shell-shocked soldiers, they are the living dead, animated by death and not by life (18). But this “invisible wound” (17) afflicts not only soldiers in Eliot’s poem but all survivors. At the brink of the dissolution of the self, the speaker was “neither / living nor dead” a few lines before (TWL 39-40). In “A Game of Chess,” the speaker is anxiously questioned: “Are you alive, or not?” (126). As Badenhausen writes, the fair answer to the question is “neither” (158). This is the cruelty of April. The eternal recurrence of spring will prolong forever the “little life” (TWL 7) of those who live in the Waste Land.
The undertones are apocalyptic. New life is born out of a land unnaturally and extensively crammed with dead young men, and therefore carries death with it into each new iteration of the natural cycle. The cadavers are the material embodiment of the war (Badenhausen 147). Turned to seed, the bodies, and thus the war, infect every inch of life after the war. The corpses looking up at the spring from their burial place become undistinguishable from the ghosts of the survivors, for they too have “a little life” that allows them to rise from their graves and wander the earth like the living dead (Levenson Genealogy 172). Spiritually, corpses and ghosts linger somewhere between salvation and condemnation. David Ward argued that the mythical Waste Land is “the interval between a death and a birth, the winter of the year and the winter of the soul” (102). In Eliot’s poem, once the “winter of the year” has come to pass, the Waste Land remains without escape in the “winter of the soul.”
In the last stanza of the poem reappears the Fisher King that appeared before in “The Fire Sermon,” fishing in the dull canal while “a rat crept softly through the vegetation / Dragging its slimy belly on the bank” (Eliot TWL 187-8). Still in the Waste Land, he sits and waits and wonders: “I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / Shall I at least set my lands in order?” (422-5). The last lines of the poem provide the answer to the question:
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih. (426-433)
The first line is a children’s nursery rhyme that connotes the catastrophic collapse of the modern metropolis. The second is a quote from Dante’s Purgatorio that once again denotes a suspension of salvation. The third recovers the myth of Philomela, the pervasiveness of sexual violence that permeates the poem. The fourth, from a sonnet by Gerard de Nerval, recalls the desolation of the medieval Waste Land. These are the fragments referred to in the next line, when the King speaks again, recognizing in himself the ruin, violence, and madness of Thomas Kyd’s Hyeronymo. This is the work, the summary of the allusions, the fragments that make up the poem. But they are not shored up against the scaffold of myth. They reverberate in myth. They are juxtaposed to one another but not aligned in a narrative. They construe a rhythm that does not lead to a logical patterning because, on the contrary, these figures “rupture” the graphic surface of the poem and disorder it (Scully 177). As Blanton has argued, “Metonymically, each fragment activates a different portion of the scattered poem (…) recalling a recurring motif” (52). But this is hardly a complete interpretation because “each line achieves a different density of sound and sense, effectively overcoding or oversaturating each available fragment” (53). In the Sanskrit prayer, the connections are “purely acoustical (…) at the apparent cost of indicative meaning,” but this is only the surface movement of the lines: “each line reestablishes something like a narrative rhyme, homologically associating fragment to fragment by means of a parallel function, a layer at which mythic echoes seem to generate poetic morphemes” (53). What the poem does not provide, as Blanton concludes, is “some articulation capable of binding one fragment meaningfully to the next” (53).
In other words, “the poem’s ultimate substance is defined by the paradoxical fact that it is not there” (Blanton 53). “Shantih shantih shantih” lets the rain be heard,22 but the mythical scaffolding that should provide a definite meaning for the rain is nowhere to be found. There is not a conclusive narrative pattern for the quest. There is not an unambiguous interpretation for the word of the thunder. What Eliot himself defined as the “water-dripping form” (qt. in McNelly Kearns 217) at the end of the poem may give sound to the pouring rain, but the meaning of the rain within the myth is unattainable. It feeds the desert of the fifth canto while stirring the dull roots of the lilacs sprouting from the dead bodies of the war. It offers salvation and takes the audience back to the beginning, trapping them as one more among the living dead. In the words of Brooker and Bentley, “in following these directions of significance, the reader encounters a reciprocal matrix of meaning” and “becomes entangled in interpretative activity and frustrated by an endless array of meanings” (175-6).
The impossibility to access univocal meaning unties the myth. The expected regeneration is intuited, but the restorative spring drizzle brings a new life inextricable from the death by water prophesized by the Tarot that was simultaneously true and false. Life is circular and eternal but subsumed to unstoppable degeneration. The ghosts lingering in Limbo are deliquescing like the Cumaean Sibyl.23 Her condition metonymically characterizes life in the Waste Land, where rebirth entails an eternal return to sickness, violence, and despair. As in primitive myth, the Waste Land is restored, but the meaning of regeneration has shifted. It is duplicitous, ambiguous, contradictory. As McNelly Kearns argues, the rebirth of vegetation is not “a celebration of some joyous spring, but a return to a kind of bondage, a ‘clutching’ and attachment where ‘the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief’” (201). The renewal of the Waste Land is a return to the Waste Land. There is no escape because, with no certain meanings, there can be no salvation. Recovering the original myth that should have provided order and myth, Brooker and Bentley interpret the ending of the poem as the speaker rejecting the quest by “turning his back to the wasted land” (201). As they write, the King wondering whether he should at least set his lands in order, after the Knight has failed to save him, implies that he can detach himself from an inextricable connection with the land, a recognition that “he is set free from the burden of being the king” (201). As Brooker and Bentley write, “from now on, it is everyone for himself. Community no longer exists. (201)
What is lost is the core meaning of the myth, its ideological foundation: the mysticism of kingship, the warranty of social order, and the promise of survival and integration for the community. The Waste Land is restored. It rains. Life is born again. But the cruel foundation of life was unearthed by the contemplation and experience of horror during the war. The violence that holds socio-political order was brutally exposed, and there is no alternative to recognizing, then, the cruelty of April. As Ward explained, April is not cruel by default; it is “cruel in action, ‘breeding,’ ‘mixing,’ ‘stirring,’ an alchemist or wizard working upon the passive death” (76). Life goes on, but accepting the prize of violence is a burden that can no longer be ignored. Life is necessarily cruel. We carry violence with us, and while it keeps us alive, it kills us. As Rabaté writes, after the war, “the European ‘spirit’ was a Hegelian Geist that was turning into ghosts, into too many ghosts” (9). Ghosts, as represented in The Waste Land, are both the living and the dead.
The Waste Land extracts from tradition the medieval myth of the Grail. Sickness and sterility overwhelm the reader. The iconic figure of the Fisher King and ritual patterns of regeneration repeatedly recur in the text, adopting different shapes. Multivalence and duplicity destabilize meaning. Stories are retold interpretatively (Williamson 155). The lecher Sweeney is simultaneously Acteon, Tereus, and Perceval (TWL 198-206), signifying both chastity and lust, salvation and perdition. From the perspective of a myth-critical lens, the poem represents the pre-modern myth in a way that recognizes the ultimate meaning of social and spiritual regeneration. Still, by exposing the violence that sustains that possibility of redemption, the poem transfixes the traditional meaning of the myth. The multiplicity of tones in the poem—satirical, tragic, prophetic, mythical—carry a multivocal expression of lament about a world wracked by unprecedented violence, where the restoration of peace cannot truly repair what has been lost. In the Grail legend, the restoration of the Waste Land entailed the restitution of social and political order and the spiritual redemption of the community. In The Waste Land, peace has been restored after the war. But, after the “destruction of civilization” (Bradbury and McFarlane 27), there are no certainties, no reliable meanings, no possibility of transcendence to enchant the cruelty that was once veiled by the illusion of myth.
1 Eliot‘s prose notes will be referenced by page number. Editor Michael North’s notes to the poem will be referenced indicating the line number followed by the abbreviation ‘n’. North’s notes to Eliot’s explanatory comments will be referenced by page number and note number. Direct quotations from the poem will be referenced by line numbers.
2 It is now commonly accepted that Eliot had written several episodes of the poem before he knew of Weston’s book. As Michael North explains, Grover Smith, among other critics who also examined Eliot‘s copy of From Ritual to Romance, noted that several pages were uncut and most likely unread (21, n. 2). In reference to his acknowledgment to Weston, Eliot himself regretted “having sent so many enquirers off on a wild goose chase after Tarot cards and the Holy Grail” (qt. in Ullyot 48).
3 Weston writes: “The misfortunes of the land have been treated rather as an accident, than as an essential, of the Grail story, entirely subordinated to the dramatis personae of the tale, or the objects, Lance and Grail, round which the actions revolves. As a matter of fact I believe that the ‘Waste Land’ is really the very heart of our problem; a rightful appreciation of its position and significance will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes of the fully developed tale” (63-64).
4 Faulk, following Chinitz, argues that the insight that Eliot gained from his readings of anthropology was that of “a fundamental continuity between primitive modes of experience and modern culture” (36), which means that “civilized life, especially the civilized arts, had a lineage in primitive custom and ancient ritual” (36).
5 As is well known, Eliot‘s working title for the poem was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” an allusion to Charles Dickens‘s Our Mutual Friend (1865). The quote alludes to Sloppy, a character similar to the dissociated speaker of The Waste Land in how they speak in ‘different voices’ as “the result of rootlessness and impoverishment” that have deprived them of their own voice (Blistein 203). Blistein also notes other major connections between Dicken’s novel and the poem, such as the pervasiveness of death by water, the only restorative quality of which is material gain. Yet, even as Dickens’s novel establishes that the contemporary forces of materialism and greed “must end upon the dust heaps of the inevitable ‘decline and fall’” (Blistein 206), it must also be noted that “while the mountainous waste of Our Mutual Friend is eventually cleared, and the land purified and renewed, Eliot’s waste remains an abiding reality” (206).
6 Northrop Frye explained the progressive predominance of stories of succession in later versions of the myth with the argument that replacing an aged and impotent king by a young and strong heir was simply a displacement of the old theme of renewing the king’s health (121).
7 Eliot famously wrote about Joyce’s Ulysses that “using myth, (…) manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity (…) is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history (…) (“Ulysses” 426). Immediately and enduringly, readers and critics “applied the terms of this review to Eliot’s inexplicable long poem” (Longenbach “Radical” 454).
8 Longenbach, for instance, has interpreted the mythical allusions in The Waste Land as operating basically on a structural level in the poem, arguing that “the references to the myth of the Fisher King build the sense of an inexplicable ‘under-pattern’ in the be verse” (“Mature” 184). Other critics, such as Blanton, have recently offered an alternative structural reading of the poem, refuting the existence of a sort of mythical skeleton for the poem, and arguing for a “structure of allusion” that offers to the text the capacity “to condense its own expression while conscripting other texts of vastly different referential scales” (44). This withdraws the poem from “conventional modes of interpretive legibility” to offer instead “intelligible associations” (49) by means of which “more voices can say less, and mean more, than one” (44).
9 This was the view of some classic criticism. Kenner, for example, argued that “the quester arrived at the Chapel Perilous had only to ask the meaning of the things that were shown to him (…) after he has asked, the king’s wound is healed and the waters commence to flow again” (147). He argues that in a world reduced “a heap of broken images,” curiosity to know the meaning of any of these fragments makes of the man asking “the agent of regeneration” (147).
10 “After the torchlight red on sweaty faces / After the frosty silence in the gardens / After the agony in stony places (…) I who was living is now dead / We who were living are now dying” (322-30).
11 The passage alluded to by Eliot can be found in Ernest Shackleton’s South (1919), the autobiographical book in which the explorer narrates his “Endurance expedition” to the Antarctic in the years between 1914 and 1916. Shackleton writes: “when I look back at those days I have no doubt that Providence guided us (…) I know that during that long and racking march of thirty-six hours over the unnamed mountains and glaciers of South Georgia it often seemed to me that we were four, not three” (230).
12 Shackleton meant to traverse the Antarctic by foot but his ship, the Endurance, was trapped in the ice before he could reach the continent. After months drifting on the ice, Shackleton and the rest of the crew sailed to the inhospitable Elephant Island on lifeboats, and from there risked an open-boat journey to the remarkably distant South Georgia. There Shackleton and his men attempted a harrowing land crossing of the island, concluding a survival adventure which was recreated in the travel narrative South as the epitome of epic achievement. Yet it is the epic story of a failure, for the fact is that Shackleton’s great imperial Trans-Antarctic expedition was an epic journey that he could not even begin.
13 The Hanged Man is actually the card that Madame Sosotris does not see: “I do not find / The Hanged Man” (54-5), but insofar as this card represents Frazer‘s sacrificial god-king, the Tarot character is present in the pack, for some characters that appear in these cards, such as the Phoenician sailor, are in fact Fisher-King figures.
14 Brooker and Bentley explain this phenomenon very eloquently: “From the first perspective, sortilege is meaningless; from the second, it is so charged with meaning that very little of it can be understood. The reader is left with two coexisting problems of knowledge: too little of it and too much. A binary perception yields two kinds of defeated perception, but a level that joins them yields an aesthetically fascinating blend of significant meaninglessness and meaningful insignificance (80).
15 Manganaro argues that, while myth is “by definition narrative,” the use the mythical method in Eliot’s poem disregards narrative to favor instead the methodology of anthropologists and social scientists of the time, who used myth as a structuring device that juxtaposed stories, rituals and actual myths of both ancient and modern peoples (81).
16 Eliot specifies that the Phoenician Sailor reminds him of Ferdinand (23), but both the quotation from Ariel’s song and Phlebas’s death by drowning identify him as counterpart of Alonso, King of Naples. Phleblas, then, stands simultaneously for Ferdinand and Alonso, who become cognate with the Maimed King of mythology in “The Fire Sermon.” Here the reader finds the Fisher King “on a winter evening round behind the gashouse / Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck / And on the king my father’s death before him” (TWL 190-192). The multiple system of references to The Tempest is complicated further, as the speaker is identified with Ferdinand speaking of “the king my father’s death” and with Antonio, musing about “the king my brother’s wreck.” This new identification of the Fisher King with Antonio, made evident by how the line transforms Shakespeare’s original, “Weeping again the King my father’s wrack” (Eliot TWL, 192n), characterizes him and his brother Prospero as Maimed King figures indistinguishable from Alonso and Ferdinand. All royals from The Tempest are thus represented in Eliot’s poem as Fisher-King figures, which in a very convoluted way illustrates the multiplication of Fisher Kings throughout the poem.
17 In the context of the poem, the Phoenician sailor is identified with the old Phoenician god Adonis. Effigies of this god were thrown to the seas during the celebration of fertility rites in Ancient Greece (Weston 47).
18 Sarah Cole also notes that Smyrna is a reputed birthplace of Homer (70), which infuses the place with mythical energy.
19 Badenhausen has claimed that “Death by water” may then be read as “a corrupted elegy, an elegy gone bad” that cautions the audience—like Madame Sosostris’ divination—rather offering any sort of consolation (152).
20 “The rituals Frazer associates with Adonis and other analogous god figures (…) are tales not only of cyclical death and rebirth but, more concisely, of murder (…) Weston, like Frazer, emphasizes the bodily quality of the injured king, the blood from his wound leaking into the ground, and the way the structure of the Grail enacts and makes symbolic the often harsh, physical features of the ancient vegetative myths” (47-48).
21 As Eliot explains in his notes (22), the crowd of ghosts is described with two references to Dante’s Divine Comedy. The first—“I had not thought death had undone so many” (Eliot TWL 62)—refers to those awaiting judgement at the Gates of Hell. The second—“sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled (63)”—describes those who died without baptism and are condemned to spend eternity in Limbo. Significantly, in a world in which the mysticism of water has been transformed into an admonition for catastrophe, to live in the Waste Land means to linger in Limbo, as the redemptive energy of the ritual of baptism has also been eradicated in the contemporary world.
22 Armin Paul Frank (48) and McNelly Kearns (217, 228) have argued for an onomatopoeic interpretation of the last like. For Brooks, the main function of the use of Sanskrit in the poem was onomatopoeic as well (203).
23 Written in Latin and Greek, the epigraph of the poem alludes to Petronius‘s Satyricon: “For I once saw with my own eyes the Cumean Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boys asked her, ‘Sybil, what do you want’ she answered, ‘I want to die’ (North, TWL 3, n1). The Sibyl asked Apollo to grant her as many years to live as there are grains in a handful of sand. She forgot however to ask for eternal youth, and thus she languishes in a state of perpetual degeneration that makes her long for death.
