Janne Borgaes
Highly Recommended
Department of English Undergraduate Awards (3rd Year)
Abstract
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land constructs a complex network of art and myth separated from time and space that influences each individual piece incorporated by Eliot. By allusion, comparisons, and extensive quotations from myths and other works of literature, The Waste Land engages with a pre-existing network of art. Their influence of this text is not one-sided. As per Eliot’s own theory of the “Mythical Method”, articulated in his essays “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” and “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, a new piece of art impacts all other works of art, a principle he develops and exemplifies in The Waste Land. Here, their reception cannot exist in isolation from each other.
Eliot articulates not just a contemporary feeling of disarticulation and chaos that arises from the rubble of World War I, but also the complex artistic network of influences and myth. He thus mimics the adaptive and hermeneutic character of myth by intertwining quotations, voices, moments of history, present, and neither. This is a close reading of the poem that focuses on the mythical intertextual networks that tie the poem together and connect it to a wider mythical tradition.
Questions of symbolism or attempting to ascertain a definitive meaning in any one specific passage will not be focused on, as that would merit at least its own book and would not engender one big symbolic revelation. Rather, as I am demonstrating, the network that connects these symbols and references is their meaning, providing reassuringly incomprehensible human structures of myth that predates the destruction wreaked by the war.
Myth and mythological motives and narratives hold a prominent presence in T.S. Eliot’s long poem The Waste Land. In his essay “Ulysses, Order, and Myth” on James Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot outlines his theory of the “mythical method” that he observes in the novel and then further develops. “In using the myth, [the writer is] manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity” (5). To Eliot, myth is thus capable of “controlling, ordering, giving a shape” (5) to chaos and confusion, which he now seeks to apply to a post-World War society. Denis Donoghue sums this mythical method up as “the juxtaposition of two levels of awareness, two planes of reality, at once similar and different” (211). This way of linking past and present serves to give structure to one or both, in this case primarily post-World War One Europe. The devastation across much of Europe that also tore into a whole generation of young Englishmen and a crisis in the theory of knowledge (Brooker & Bentley 13) created a social, but also artistic atmosphere of uncertainty and disorientation. Historically, myth has been the source of explanation of natural phenomena and societal structures, of etiological and eschatological orders, connecting their writers and audiences to the world around them and their history, and Eliot utilises this connection in the structure of his poem.
However, references to myth throughout the poem also seem at first glance disconnected or only tangentially connected to the scene portrayed in the respective section. In “II. A Game of Chess”, for instance, the citation of “laquearia” (l. 92) from the Aeneid refers to a banquet scene in Dido’s palace in Corinth, a city which will appear again later. The setting is somewhat analogous to that of the pub meeting, it also being a social scenario involving food and talk. The setting here is not so much described as signified by the barkeeper’s frequent interjection between the speakers jumbled private conversations.
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Well, that Sunday Albert was home, they had a hot gammon,
And they asked me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot –
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
HURRY UP PLEASE IT'S TIME
Goonight Bill. Goonight Lou. Goonight May. Goonight. (l.165 – 170)
But apart from this similarity the Dido reference does not illuminate any relationships or seem to provide new context or deeper understanding to the scene. However, Gilbert Seldes wrote of the reading process that “gradually one discovers a rhythm of alternation between the visionary (so to name the memories of the past) and the actual, between the spoken and the unspoken thought” (138). The individual comparisons between scenes are not as important as the connections they establish firstly across the poem and then out of it between texts and traditions. Thus, with the consideration of other myths that influence the poem, a rich network of intertextuality and evocative citation emerges.
The other parts of this network at first appear similarly empty with deep meaning. Cleopatra, once part of a rich mythologised history, now resides in an enclosed space that still echoes the luxury of her life and status, but also entraps her in a paralysing, resin-like artificiality.
In vials of ivory and coloured glass
Unstoppered, lurked her strange synthetic perfumes.
Unguent, powdered, or liquid – troubled, confused
And drowned the sense in odours; stirred by the air
That freshened from the window […]
Huge sea-wood fed with copper
Burned green and orange, framed by the coloured stone,
In which sad light a carvèd dolphin swam. (l. 86 – 96)
David Craig summarises this as “an indoor, lifelessly ornate setting” (201). And indeed, her “strange synthetic perfumes” and the artificial “carvéd dolphin” in a “sad light” can only imitate the natural world outside, but not fully recreate it. Generally, there is the sense that these feelings or the soul behind the myth are lost in Eliot’s mimetic process: “The nymphs are departed” (l. 175), the actual subjects of myth have left a world that, after a devastating war and alarming revolution in Russia, seems empty and devoid of meaning. This empty shape that myth is made to take on here also governs the poem’s landscape, especially the marked absence of water and liquidity experienced by the barren “brown land” (l.175), “cracked earth” (l. 369). In “V. What the Thunder Said”, the speaker encounters a desolate dry landscape in which “there is no water” (l. 358). However, he can summon the mere sound of water into the poem by mere wishful thinking.
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water (l. 347 - 358)
A poem can only recreate sounds, not the actual physical thing that makes them. This echo of a disappeared and insubstantial albeit vividly invoked element reflects the mythical presences in the poem. Their sounds are recreated, they are quoted to great extent every few lines and assist with the foundation of a semi-narrative red thread through the poem in the form of Ovid’s Tiresias and Phlebas the Phoenician Sailor.
However, Harriet Davidson also characterises myth as self-contradicting, as the Wagner quotation “Öd’ und leer” (l. 40), desolate and empty, “counters the speaker’s sense of emptiness with cultural plenitude” (128). As Seldes remarked, eventually this “cultural plenitude” starts forming a pattern across the poem, communicating with both the present scene and each other. They commiserate with each other in the barrenness that they either contain or in which they are rendered by an artificial portrayal. This also relates to what Eliot writes about intertextuality in his 1919 essay “On Tradition and the Individual Talent”.
No poet, no artist of any kind has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. (106)
By weaving quotes from and references to myth and other stories, Eliot precludes what he expects from his readership and indeed anyone engaging with art. He firmly places himself in the network of mythical connections and influences, claiming perhaps not equality in writing, but certainly his own importance in said entanglement of art. This is because in doing so, Eliot moves past one-sided inspiration and appropriation, and what seems at times like ekphrasis applied to texts. Rather, the “existing monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new” (106). And indeed, these myths start to communicate to one another across the poem as some of their differences but also similarities become apparent.
Furthermore, in the form these myths are quoted by Eliot, they already have undergone adaptation and rewriting into multiple new contexts. For instance, the Tristan and Isolde myth, made popular through the medieval romance based on even earlier stories, is here invoked by a quotation from Wagner’s operatic retelling of it.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du? (l. 31 – 34)
Myths are also not just linked to the present, but also other myths and literary works throughout the poem. The quotation from and modification of Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song” (l. 176), is itself linked to the older Greek nymphs that frame this reference.
[…] The nymphs are departed.
Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song.
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends
Or other testimonies of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. (l. 175 – 179)
They are made part of a larger connection, not just one large mythology of the past with the contemporary of the vanished empty bottles and sandwich papers, but several layers of myth whose reading automatically impacts readings of the other myths. There is no movement “in any direction suggesting a possible unitive perspective” (Brooker and Bentley 130), but rather an oscillating agglomeration of mythical associations.
The Fisher King, arguably the most significant and at the same time elusive of mythological figures in the poem, also features in Jessie L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, which inspired much of the poem, including its title. It is significant that it is the Fisher King that dominates the poem. As opposed to the Aeneid and the Greek myths, the Fisher King is a distinctly Christian myth, involved on the Arthurian knight’s quest for the Holy Grail. The Fisher King’s own quest to regain his fertility and agency lends the poem its own apparent drive to create order amidst a cacophony of voices and images. Additionally, in the myth the Fisher King’s injury separates him from the land of his kingdom, as “before his wound, the king and his land were one, but he was not conscious of it” (Brooker & Bentley 66). This disruption of a vital, established order and subsequent effort to regain said order forms an essential part of the poem as symbols of rebirth and regrowth struggle through the poem: The endeavour to regain water in a waste land and the “stirring [of] / dull roots with spring rain” (l. 3f.) similarly evoke a barren landscape under the surface of which potential waits to be aroused again. This prevalence of water and references to fertility set counterpoints against the Fisher King’s impotence. For instance, one of the women at the pub in “II. A Game of Chess” “had five [children] already, and nearly died of young George” (l. 160), suffering in her fertility just as the Fisher King does in his lack thereof. Additionally, in “III. The Fire Sermon”, Eliot conjured two representatives of asceticism and self-denial.
To Carthage then I came
Burning burning burning burning
O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest
Burning (l. 307 – 311)
The quotation of “To Carthage then I came” (l. 307) traces back to St Augustine’s Confessions where the full quote reads “to Carthage then I came, where a cauldron of unholy loves sang all about mine ears” (from Eliot’s own notes on the poem). These unholy loves refer to a hedonistic culture of sexual promiscuity, which St Augustine engages in. The quote used by Eliot is followed by a sequence in which St Augustine “polluted the spring of friendship with the filth of concupiscence and dimmed its lustre with the slime of lust” (31). Again, the myth of the Fisher King’s involuntary impotence is inverted and reflected back by a story of hypersexuality and virility which is eventually given up freely as Augustine gives himself to celibacy. Furthermore, St Augustine is intermingled with the Buddha’s Fire Sermon. Similarly, as Siddhartha, the Buddha lived a full and luxurious life with a child before seeking enlightenment in asceticism, including in self-imposed celibacy. This brings an apparent incongruity to the mythical network, but also creates a balance of fates that eventually reach the same point where no more procreation occurs. Myth’s symmetrical movement here suggests at least the reassuring appearance of a logical order of equilibrium in a chaotic post-war world.
It is the synaptic quality of myth that Eliot then additionally utilises to create a structure that leans on and engages in constant hermeneutic contact with other myths and literary fragments, facilitating a constant stream of inspiration and interrogation in all directions. And yet, the present poet’s engagement with it also alters its nature, highlights the circular, recurring qualities of myth, the basic patterns it reflects. Themes of barrenness, infertility, and impotence in any literal or metaphorical sense resonate as much in present circumstances as in the “ancient” times. Myth thus is rendered less of an ancient presence in a contemporary poem but rather becomes part of a synaptic system of art and storytelling that shifts with every new quotation and allusion in the poem. It also reaffirms the cyclical and repetitive nature of history and human experience. The Fisher King’s despair at his own lack of potency can give commiserating solace to the disillusioned man after the Great War, just as Dido in the feast episode of the Aeneid could communicate a similar experience of empty riches and ceremonies to Cleopatra.
The Waste Land mimics networks that are vital to our understanding of what can be loosely called out civilisation. These networks, such as history, interpersonal entanglements, myth and storytelling, and everything that connects them to each other, do not always make sense. World War One has at this point resulted in a climate of uncertainty and loss of trust in the political system. The deaths of millions of young men and the economic devastation further add to a general sense of disconnect. According to Donoghue, “the force of a myth, in its bearing upon events, is that it speaks from a long perspective and gathers into its story much experience of poverty, need, and hope” (209). Myth thus can bring order into a devastated England, not by replacing the structures that were dismantled by crisis, but rather by establishing a network of stories and myths that collectivise the experience of loss and confusion through history. Its networks of imbalances followed by narrative equilibrium suggest an obscure cosmic balancing act that may give some sense of structure in a society after crisis. The presentation of these mythologies is objective while they themselves are deeply subjective, evoking magic, literary passion, and deeply felt tragedies. They bring into equilibrium a subjective but orderly world that is lost or in the process of being lost, while also, by their seeming irrelevance and meaninglessness, representing the present world of objectivity and confusion. To make this “modern world possible for art” (“Ulysses, Order, and Art”, 5), myth lends itself as a point of connection that embeds the present in a wider synaptic net of art and meaning.
Works Cited
Augustine. Confessions. Translated and edited by Albert C. Outler, Southern Methodist University 1955.
Brooker, Jewel Spears; Bentley, Joseph. Reading The Waste Land – Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation. University of Massachusetts Press, 1990.
Craig, David. “The Poem and its Substitutes” in T.S. Eliot: The Waste Land: A Casebook edited by C.B. Cox and Arnold P. Hinchliffe, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 200 – 214.
Davidson, Harriet. “Reading The Waste Land” in The Cambridge Companion to T.S. Eliot edited by A. David Moody. pp. 121 – 141.
Donoghue, Denis. “Yeats, Eliot, and the Mythical Method”. The Sewanee Review, Vol. 105, No. 2, 1997, pp. 206 – 226.
Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition – Vol. 2 edited by Anthony Cuda and Ronald Schuchard, John Hopkins University Press 2004, pp. 105 – 114.
---. “Ulysses, Order and the Mythical Method”, The Dial, November 1923, pp. 480 – 483. https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/review-of-ulysses-by-t-s-eliot-from-the-dial?mobile=off, accessed 28.05.2023.
Seldes, Gilbert. “T.S. Eliot” in The Waste Land edited by Michael North. W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.
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