'The Waste Land'

Hello readers, I'm writing this blog as an assignment given by the Department of English, MKBU. Here, I'm trying to analyse the modern epic poem of T.S.Eliot 'The Waste Land'.

 T.S.Eliot:

Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on September 26, 1888, St. Louis, Missouri, U.S, and died on January 4, 1965, London, England. He was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry in such works as The Waste Land (1922) and Four Quartets (1943). Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His experiments in diction, style, and versification revitalized English poetry, and in a series of critical essays he shattered old orthodoxies and erected new ones. The publication of Four Quartets led to his recognition as the greatest living English poet and man of letters, and in 1948 he was awarded both the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize for Literature. 

Introduction to the Poem:

In the writing of the poem 'The Waste Land' Eliot was influenced by Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance (1919) which supplied him with the legend of the Grail and the Fisher King. He was impressed by James Frazer’s book The Golden Bough (1890) which provided him with the knowledge of a number of vegetation and fertility myths and rituals, especially those connected with Attis, Adonis and Osiris. The waste Land of King Fisher, the waste land of King Oedipus of Thebes and the Biblical waste land provided a solid foundation for the wasteland of Eliot.

This modern epic is divided in five parts:

1.The Burial of the Dead

2.A Game of Chess

3.The Fire Sermon

4.Death by Water

5.What the Thunder Said

Central Theme of 'The Waste Land':

Death Fear:

In 'The Waste Land' violence against the body is the one which is depicted or referred to most often. This is so because coition is the source of life and of death and is therefore the source of consciousness that man is "nothing but a body as far as nature is concerned." Equating sex and generation with death and inferiority, as Eliot's people do, produces a static compromise existence in which they live as though dead and thus avoid both life and death.

Apathy and Incest Fixation:

Apathy has been described as a retreat into the self, the barren land of the uncommitted life, in a flight from humanness and death. There are two psychological elements of apathy: narcissism and oedipal fixation. The Waste Land criticism holds that Eliot mentions Coriolanus, near the end of the poem, to emphasize the destructive effects of narcissism. While bringing the thunder's message of life to the dead land, Eliot comments here and, in a sense, interprets this message by describing narcissism. The poem clearly shows that narcissism is a state of apathy in which one feels "empty, fragmented, missing a piece, help- less and hopeless, filled with rage, inert."

Incest fixation is a major theme of The Waste Land. Sophocles Tiresias in the poem implies that the secret illness of the land has to do with the wrong kind of love, incestuous, murderous love. Because Tiresias is the presiding intelligence of the poem and is, as Eliot's note says, "the most important personage in the poem," his knowledge of the secret disease of incest is most significant. The incest theme exists not only in the implied reference to Oedipus. It is elaborated in the references to Hamlet and to Tereus' rape of his sister-in-law, Philomel, whose story is carved above the antique mantel of the narcissistic lady of fashion. 

Sexual Perversion:

Eliot cites the instances of guilty love in the first section of the poem with reference to Waqner’s opera Tristan and Isolde. Then he goes to another guilty love of the hyacinth girl.

In the section of Game of Chess we are introduced to sexual violation in high-class society where a lustful duke seduces a young married-woman. Sex also prevails among the lower class of society. Eliot mentions the story of Lil and the experience of three daughters of Thames. Another example is that of the mechanical sex relation between the typist girl and her boyfriend. A homosexual relation is exemplified by Mr. Eugenides. Eliot sums up the story of European lust through the words of St. Augustine.

Spiritual Degradation:

Perverted sensuality has depraved the human mind severely. Now man cannot think acutely. He is now spiritually barren. As a consequence, he has renounced religion and welcomed secularism. Excessive love sickness has made him insensible and narcissistic. He doesn’t feel any urge to revitalize his spiritual life. As a result, the emergence of April (the month of regeneration and rebirth) doesn’t stimulate his conscience or even make him happy. To him April is cruel because it reminds him of his spiritual decay and makes him think of regeneration. He likes Winter, the month of death and decay because during this period he feels free to enjoy all sorts of animal passions.

Points to ponder:

As per my understanding, I try to give responses on the points to ponder which are mentioned here in the blog of Dilip Barad sir. 

https://blog.dilipbarad.com/2014/10/presentations-on-ts-eliots-waste-land.html?m=1

1)T.S.Eliot and Friedrich Nietzsche:

The above phrase is tell that the time is always changing or a progressive. The time is always dynamic , not static.The growth of society is always like climbing the mountain. If we want to reach at top we have to keep moving on. 

Yes I believe that Eliot’s idea of going back to Holy scriptures for finding solution of present malaises is regressive. 

Frederic Nietzsche was a German philosopher who gave the term ' Übermensch', which means the ideal superior man of the future who could rise above conventional Christian morality to create and impose his own values, originally described by Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra.

For example Siddharth who was born in royal family and then left his home in pursuit of knowledge known as 'Mahabhinishkraman'. He lived in the 5th-century BC. He was a normal human being and has practiced intense meditation. Though he was not god but was having superhuman quality as compared to other humans. Then he becomes leader in Buddhism but with passing of time he was considered as god.

Eliot is regressive as compared to Nietzsche, he have used many myth in his poem waste land, there is nothing wrong in being regressive because people learns from past. If people have done something wrong in past they can recover or learns not to repeat same thing in present. Eliot gave example of myth in the context of present.

Eliot, conversely, argued that early twentieth-century Anglo-American culture suffered precisely from its lack of tradition: without a strong sense of history, young artists were deprived of a fertile, nurturing soil on which to flourish. Despite the oppositional polemics of the two essays, then, both circle around the same dilemma: how to break out of a contemporary crisis of creativity and locate a space for originality within tradition. Nietzsche criticizes history in the name of "life", Eliot tempers Romantic impulses in order to nurture and shape tradition. In the end, both writers find themselves negotiating the same area of temporal contradiction, where the apparent duality between "modernity" and "history", "present" and "past" blurs. Modernity discovers its inherent ambiguity, and both writers, approaching from different directions, confront paradox.

This opposition, centered on the concept of "history," begins to dissolve when "history" proves to be closer to its opposite than both writers had admitted in their confrontational openings. For Eliot, "the historical sense" denotes not merely an understanding of history as that which occurred in the past, but also a sense of history as presence, "the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.

2)T.S.Eliot and Sigmund Freud:

Sigmund Freud believed in individuality and talked about "primitive instinct" whereas Eliot believed in preservation of cultural traditions which means all together. 

Freud wrote that for progress any individual primitive instinct was needed but in order to preserve tradition Eliot says that there is need for it to grew together.

Culture demands that individuals suppress their urges, especially sexuality and aggression. With the help of the superego, the moral authority within, man directs his aggression against himself and has his behavior under control. This suppression makes people unhappy and causes neurosis. In The Discontent in Culture, Freud processed the experiences of the First World War and the post-war period. Accordingly, the work is strongly culturally pessimistic, Freud opposes an artless belief in progress. For him, people are not free in their decisions, but are primarily controlled by their instincts. Freud's theories and the psychoanalysis he developed had an enormous influence on intellectual life in the 20th century. 

The Waste Land is best read against the Freudian background it invokes and resists. Eliot's identification with the all-knowing but understanding. Tiresias should be seen as a refutation of Freud's Oedipal reading. The Waste Land further resists a psychoanalytic interpretation by depicting the poet as the self-conscious organizer of the poem's symptomatic fragments, particularly in the 'notes' which gesture toward the interpretive systems which Eliot espoused and act as a preemptive strike against inevitable Freudian interpretations. In addition, The Waste Land's hyper- allusivity burlesque psychoanalytic reliance on the telling allusion and argues for the literary critic rather than the psychoanalyst as The Waste Land's authoritative interpreter. The Waste Land's indeterminacy enacts Eliot's skepticism about Freudian conceptions of cultural inheritance and analytic interpretation. 

3)Allusions to the Indian thoughts in 'The Waste Land'. 

The Fire Sermon:

Here Eliot gave the same name to the third part of his poem. The whole poem describes the theme of sexual perversion and by referring to this sermon of Buddha because he also wants to convey a message to stay detached from all the senses.

 River Ganga and Himalaya:

"Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant."

River Ganga is known for its purity and also for purification. While Himalaya is known for spirituality and peace. Eliot finds the solution of all contemporary problems in spirituality. That is the reason he refers to Ganga and Himalaya here.

The Thunder:

In Upanishad the Prajapati spoke the message of salvation through thunder which was called “Akashvani”. Here Eliot also gives reference to Thunder to convey that now the solution of all problems will be given by Thunder, that is the reason he gave name to his 5th part of poem “What the Thunder Said”.

Three Da:

DA

Datta: what have we given?

My friend, blood shaking my heart

The awful daring of a moment’s surrender

Which an age of prudence can never retract

By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries

Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider

Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor

In our empty rooms

DA

Dayadhvam: I have heard the key

Turn in the door once and turn once only

We think of the key, each in his prison

Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison

Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours

Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus

DA

Damyata: The boat responded

Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar

The sea was calm, your heart would have responded

Gaily, when invited, beating obedient

To controlling hands

I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?

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

These three Da are spoken by Thunder. Which means this is the way of salvation. The first Da “Datta'' means to give. Give sacrifice for others, and help each other. The second Da “Dayadhvam '' means sympathize and empathize with others. Third Da “Damyata '' means self control, control over the senses. According to Eliot this is the way one could get salvation.

  

Shantih mantra:

The Shantih mantra is for inner peace, peace that passes understanding. Eliot ends his poem with this mantra and with hope. The hope of re-birth, end of modern malaises, and growth of spirituality. To show the hope he ends this poem with Shantih mantra. 

4)'The Waste Land' as a Pandemic Poem:

'Viral Modernism' is an elegantly written, penetrating study of how the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919 shaped modernist literature and society, most notably in Clarissa’s illnesses in Mrs. Dalloway; the burning thirst and drowning in The Waste Land. 

The voices that surface through the exquisite readings of this well-researched, well-argued study offer insight not only into the tragic experience of this devastating disease but also into how those affected use literary and cultural forms to make sense of that experience, hence into the nature of storytelling itself. 

This was personal for Eliot, he and his wife had both been seriously ill during the flu pandemic, and it had left them anxious and enervated. Some of the depictions of marital discontent in the poem, especially in the section titled “A Game of Chess,” portray not only an unhappy couple but an unhappy couple weakened by illness, trapped together in a miserable fever dream. In 'Viral Modernism' by Elizabeth Outka, explores the influence of the pandemic on Eliot’s work, especially on the aesthetics of fragmentation and themes of hallucination and thirst. He frequently employs images of bodily distortion and mental delirium. 

Thus, The influence of the 1918 "Spanish flu" pandemic can be seen in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land". Eliot's The Waste Land, written in 1922, three years after Eliot and his wife caught and recovered from influenza. 1918-1919 strain of influenza often left its survivors with mental and nervous aftereffects, and that Eliot himself remarked that his mind did not seem right. 

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