DIPARTIMENTO DI
FILOLOGIA, LETTERATURA E LINGUISTICA
Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Letterature e Filologie
Euroamericane
TESI DI LAUREA
From Cruellest April to Shantih: man and nature in T. S. Eliot’s
The Waste Land, Ash Wednesday and Four Quartets
CANDIDATO
RELATORE
Antonino Virga
Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Roberta Ferrari
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“Credula vitam spes fovet, et melius cras fore semper ait”
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Index
Foreword 5 Chapter I: Cultural Background 7
1.1 City versus Country: a long-standing debate 7
1.2 The Industrial Revolution 8
1.3 The Romantic Movement 9
1.4 Modernism 10
1.5 Thomas Stearns Eliot 13
Chapter II: The Waste Land 17
2.1 Introduction 17
2.2 The genesis of the poem 17
2.3 The structure 20
2.4 The themes 24
2.4.1 Decay in a desert City 25
2.4.2 Unreal City of the living dead 41
2.4.3 Shantih: a peaceful glimmer in a ruined land 49
Chapter III: Ash Wednesday 53
3.1 From ashes to life 53
3.2 A prayer for the Lady 62
3.3 Redeeming time 66
3.4 A Word for the World 71
3.5 “Our peace in His will” 77
Chapter IV: Four Quartets 84
4.1 Escaping time 84
4.2 “Into the rose garden” 97
4.3 “In my end is my beginning” 106
4.4 Faring forward 112
4.5 Redeeming fire 120
Conclusion 126
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Foreword
The aim of this work is to investigate the relationship between man and nature in three poems by Thomas Stearns Eliot – The Waste Land (1922), Ash Wednesday (1930) and
Four Quartets (1943) –, illustrating the manner in which it evolves from a deteriorated
connective circuit to an harmonious organic communication, as the ground gradually relinquishes its concreteness and acquires a metaphysical, ethereal condition.
After a succinct introduction, where the necessary coordinates about the poet’s life are given and the theme of this work is explained, the following chapters steadily detect the way in which man and nature mutually influence each other, displaying how an original disordered situation, where the human condition does not match the elemental surroundings, can later develop into a restored, proper regulation, mystically achieved in an unreality which simultaneously includes both spheres.
Starting from the devastated world of The Waste Land, in which the scenery clearly exhibits a corrupted macrocosm where man is not in accordance with nature, where his selfish solipsism separates him from the environment, and where his sterile ideals uniquely provoke self-destruction, the individual is nevertheless offered a resolution through a purgatorial, atoning path. Ash Wednesday, indeed, halfway between material reality and phenomenal realm, attempts to guide the subject towards a reconciliation with both nature and God, by unfolding an expiatory itinerary which allows the pilgrim to detach from his debauched values and to reach a new, pure dimension where a connection with the saving principle can occur. Here man is suspended between an earthly world, which constantly tempts him through futile vanities and alluring dreams, through a prosperous nature whose thriving components are nonetheless deceptive, and
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a transcendental world, which manifests itself as an Edenic paradise, but whose revelation requires a penitential, challenging exercise.
A practice which is developed and synthesized in the final work, Four Quartets, where the craved reunion between human being and Divinity eventually takes place, in an absolute natural balance where time and space are definitely cancelled, and where each element – air, earth, water and fire – is integrated within the universe. Here, in fact, a cosmic nature pervades history and humanity, together with their space-time coordinates, and every entity necessitates a perfect sync before the lost order can be recomposed: the single individual, along with his overall experience (his time and his place), is called to explore an affirmative path, made of joyful glares and positive achievements, and a negative way, imbued with sorrow and contrition, in the awareness that both roads will lead him to the only true point of intersection, the unique Love that transcends time and space, aligns each cosmic component, and ensures the ideal communion between man and nature.
Expounded as an ascetic, ascendant route – clearly recalling the Dantean itinerary from the gloomy wood to the heavenly light –, which progressively develops from the contemporary, barren world, and, through a median, spiritual detachment, reaches its point of arrival in another, sacred realm, the connection between man and nature has been surveyed keeping in mind the personal journey that the same poet, both artistically and privately, undertook, beginning from an oeuvre fully soaked with mundane traits, and ending with a composition where humanity is noticeably redeemed from any appearance of temporality, where man is elevated above false and evanescent illusions, and where celestial grace can permit him to purify his soul, to be renewed.
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Chapter I: Cultural Background
1.1 City versus Country: a long-standing debate
The contrast between the corrupted city and the idyllic countryside represents a typical literary paradigm which reaches back to classical times. In his Bucolics, Virgil (I B.C.) praised the rustic life of those shepherds who chose to retire in a locus amoenus, the pleasant and utopian Arcadia, in order to seek refuge from the tragic and complex reality of the city. The country was a place in which they could practice otium, a fixed reality where nothing changed and everything was surrounded by a halo of tranquility. According to this image, the country has gathered over time the idea of a natural way of life, which has often been associated with peace and innocence1.
This traditional differentiation may also be validated by the etymological root of the term country, whose Vulgar Latin form contrata indicated “a land lying opposite” or “a land spread before one”2. The same noun thus incorporates the concept of ‘opposition’, a concept which has endured through ages and sometimes has even been exacerbated within literary works.
Particularly, it was in the late eighteenth century that writers such as William Wordsworth, an English poet who can be inscribed among the major exponents of Romanticism, began to denounce the ugliness of the city, the dirty metropolis, which hosted a number of anonymous individuals and offered nothing but chaos. The author resumed the antithesis ‘beautiful country – ugly city’, and again highlighted the virtuous role of the country, which combined the pureness of its inhabitants, the modest
1 Williams, Raymond, The Country and the City, New York, Oxford University Press, 1973, p. 1. 2 Partridge, Eric, Origins: an etymological dictionary of modern English, London, Routledge, 1966.
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bards, with the honesty of their mandate: working for Nature. This purpose was what rendered Wordsworth’s country more than a basic land separated from the city: his
Grasmere Fair, indeed, resembled a utopian world, a transcendental landscape in which
all the individuals accomplished their duty, lived in peace and realized a communion with their unique and just god, Nature3.
A useful contextualization, at this stage, could help explain the reasons that compelled writers like Wordsworth to make a complaint on the dreadful circumstance which London and other vast cities revealed, or risked to reveal, at that time. The great event which proves essential for the understanding of this situation is clearly the
Industrial Revolution which, in the eighteenth century, notably involved the United
Kingdom and, successively, affected a large portion of Europe.
1.2 The Industrial Revolution
As the expression itself suggests, the historical process which influenced the English nation from the last decades of the 18th to the first half of the 19th century4, represented a radical revolution, an abrupt passage from a relatively stable system to a different and progressive one, a transition which, however, should be considered as the prolongation of a transformation begun ages earlier, and which, of course, would affect the future of entire generations5.
It would be wrong to assume that the Industrial Revolution entailed a development which occurred in terms of factories and machinery. Certainly, this constituted the point
3 Bate, Jonathan, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and Environmental Tradition, London and New
York, Routledge, 1991, pp. 1-35.
4 The conventional chronology of the Industrial Revolution in the United Kingdom situates it in the
time span which starts from 1780 and reaches its maturity around 1830.
5 Wrigley, Edward A., La Rivoluzione Industriale in Inghilterra: continuità, caso e cambiamento,
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of departure for the subsequent extraordinary change, but the revolution under discussion was as broad and intricate as it ended up covering even the cultural level of society, which apparently appeared so detached from such technical issues.
The most significant trait which characterized England and rendered it the initiator of this innovative action was its commerce: indeed, the British trade, which for years had assured the country its absolute monopoly, began to strengthen, as a precautionary measure, its positions on a global scale, and to initiate a commercial development which moved beyond any geographical limit and broadened its national industrial opportunities. The related increasing demand for manufacturing manpower, the demographic growth and the introduction of factories with a serial division of labor impelled many people to migrate from the countryside to the city.
The process of urbanization which interested those years caused London to become a huge metropolis where a crawling and prosperous life had just commenced. A new era was about to be inaugurated, and the English society could start contemplating a new mentality, one in which the ideology of progress was a synonym for great and plentiful mutations6.
1.3 The Romantic Movement
Nonetheless, this advanced different world did not thrill the overall population, as some cultural movements clearly showed. The intellectual group of the Romantic poets, a circle of writers, amongst whom Wordsworth was an outstanding figure, scrutinized the scientific revolution introduced in their country and perceived it as a negative instrument which man could employ in order to take his control over nature. These
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poets harshly reacted against the technological progress and strongly praised that pure and pastoral nature which ran the risk of being spoiled by the harmful action of men.
Therefore, to the overpopulated, chaotic and contaminated city, they opposed the idle, peaceful and rustic countryside, where the individual could still find his primitive and essential bond with creation. Nature was the locus which could guarantee a recollection of emotion in tranquility, and which could offer introspective moments that kept man afar from corruption, bringing him in proximity to God7.
This spiritualized Nature enticed several artists to celebrate, through paintings or poems, the vastness of this entity, which found its best representation in splendid landscapes untouched by the hand of man. Man, in fact, was banned from this tabernacle of purity; he was relegated to that stained universe which was evolving into a cumulus of unknown identities, a shadow of unreal lives: the city8.
1.4 Modernism
The Romantic disdain for urban life and the severe criticism of the mechanical modern world held, at a distance of many years, the attention of an artistic movement which, notwithstanding, emerged as a substantial supporter of the new, and owed its origins precisely to the development of the contemporary industrial societies, along with the rapid growth of the cities.
In her 1924 essay Mr Bennet and Mrs Brown, the eminent modern writer Virginia Woolf observed: “On or about December 1910, human character changed”9, an
7 Burke, Tim, “The Romantic Georgic and the Work of Writing”, in Mahoney, Charles (ed.), A
Companion to Romantic Poetry, Oxford, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 148-56.
8 Ivi.
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observation which accurately captured the breakdown that was upsetting the early years of a new age, when a remarkable transformation of the world, and specifically of Britain, was taking place. The First World War10, of course, represented the utmost event, whose atrocity shook the conscience of those people who had been persuaded that progress and science could eradicate human misery11. The countless casualties left each country in a disillusioned and cynical mood, and every certainty seemed to have vanished12.
A sense of fragmentation, which was as much geographical and historical as it was cultural and psychological, haunted the individuals of the 1920s, and profoundly affected the United Kingdom, whose artistic culture could not remain untouched by those tragic circumstances. As D. H. Lawrence wrote in 1923, the spirit of the old London collapsed during those bellicose years, and “the city […] perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears and horrors”13. In an age marked by a disillusion with outmoded forms and by the cultural disintegration imposed by the war and its immediate aftermath, the feeling that a new start ought to be made in society as much as in art was thus accentuating, and a variety of new beginnings and rejections of the past testified that flippant but truly factual
10 The First World War was a global conflict which started in 1914 and involved the Central European
Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy) on one side and the Triple Entente (Britain and the British Empire, France and Russia and their allies) on the other. It ended in 1918 and the Peace treaty was signed in 1919.
11 The material progress and prosperity guaranteed by the Industrial Revolution determined, in the
nineteenth century, a deep faith in science, which materialized in a philosophical and cultural movement named Positivism, which promoted certain (“positive”) knowledge based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations.
12 Morrison, Mark, “The 1910s and the Great War”, in Sherry, Vincent (ed.), The Cambridge History
of Modernism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p.101.
13 Steele, Bruce, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of D. H. Lawrence: Kangaroo, Cambridge,
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announcement formulated by Woolf, merging in a literary condition that was indisputably ‘modern’14.
It was largely through the ‘little magazines’ that the successful Modernist revolution in poetry was announced, carried forward and propagated. In particular, the appearance of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the first issue of the quarterly magazine The
Criterion in October 1922 struck many as forcefully expressing the disordered and
irregular nature of the modern condition in an undoubtedly ‘modern’ language. A new language and a new poetry, which only could mirror the “stark and unlovely actualities” through “a stark directness without a shadow of a lie, or a shadow of deflection anywhere”15, as Lawrence asserted, believing that a bare directness of statement ought to constitute true poetic expression. This belief sorely reversed the Romantic definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility”, by establishing an ideal of objective poetry which was not “a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality”16.
The modern style obviously represented the imitation and reflection of a reality which was quite intricate and difficult to be grasped and explained, of a world decay which compelled artists and writers to escape from such a complex realm and to take refuge in an elitist microcosm in which art might aspire to ‘redeem’ reality itself. A ‘symbolic’ world, echoed by “a poetry that evoked mysterious forces outside of everyday life, or expressed vague, abstract moods or mental states”17, and which was as
14 Smith, Stan, The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of Renewal, New
York, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994, pp. 27-32.
15 Banerjee, Amitava, D. H. Lawrence’s Poetry: Demon Liberated: A Collection of Primary and
Secondary Material, London, Palgrave Macmillan, 1990, p. 31.
16 Eliot, Thomas S., The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism, London, Methuen & Co. Ltd.,
1920, pp. 52-53.
17 Faulk, Barry J., “T. S. Eliot and the Symbolist City”, in Chinitz, David E. (ed.), A Companion to T.
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complex and ambiguous as the surroundings it described18. Within this novel and challenging ambience, the figure of T. S. Eliot was clearly in the foreground.
1.5 Thomas Stearns Eliot
In regard to The Waste Land, the American writer and critic Edmund Wilson admitted: “I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse”, praising Eliot as “one of our only authentic poets”19, and epitomizing the blended but, at the same time, diverse essence of the most important and influential poet of his own and of the two subsequent generations.
Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in 1888 in St. Louis, Missouri, into a family of English descent. As a student at Harvard University between 1906 and 1914, he became acquainted with an eclectic range of philosophical, historical and literary scholarship, developing a cosmopolitan literary knowledge which could later be manifested in his sojourn in Paris, where he attended lectures by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, conquering his access to the Symbolist poets and their innovative works.
Baudelaire’s poetry, in particular, crucially influenced Eliot, since it was able to reveal “an elevation of imagery of the sordid life of a great metropolis […] to the first intensity”, an elevation which “created a mode of release and expression for other men”20. Eliot considered Baudelaire the great inventor of a modern poetry, because his verse and language seemed “the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have
18 Gozzi, Francesco, “La rottura dei codici: il linguaggio”, in Cianci, Giovanni (ed.),
Modernismo/Modernismi: dall’avanguardia storica agli anni Trenta e oltre, Milano, Principato, 1991,
pp. 293-97.
19 Wilson, Edmund, “The Poetry of Drouth”, The Dial, LXXIII, 6, December 1922, pp. 611–16. 20 Eliot, Thomas S., Selected Essays, London, Faber and Faber Limited, 1932, p. 388.
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experienced”21. A style which Eliot decidedly opposed to the other paramount figure, whose influence proved more lasting and haunting: Dante. In Dante’s verses “the thought may be obscure, but the word is lucid, or rather translucent”22, so that his medieval spirituality and his poetic authority could perfectly address the modern condition in a direct way, by providing any poet with a constant reminder “of the obligation to explore, to find words for the inarticulate, to capture those feelings which people can hardly even feel, because they have no words for them”23.
This assumption justifies Eliot’s constant attempt to explore “beyond the frontiers of ordinary consciousness”24, as he started to demonstrate in his Harvard doctoral thesis. Its topic was experience and the objects of knowledge in the work of the Oxford philosopher F. H. Bradley, whose interest in the relationship between the subjective consciousness and the objective world could explain Eliot’s persistent interest in individual and external patterns of order, or his consistent pursuit of a relation between individual perception and a larger human tradition25. He argued indeed that “no poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone”26, so that, like man’s experience, which is chaotic, is always formed by former disparate experiences that all contribute to the shaping of his own existence, literary tradition, which is fragmented, is continually
shored up with precedent cultural creations that help forging its own history27.
At the outbreak of the First World War, London seemed the most congenial environment to his longings and temperaments, a city which favored the publication of several philosophical essays, a succinct period of teaching activity, and a notable job as
21 Ivi.
22 Ibidem, p. 239.
23 Eliot, Thomas S., “What Dante Means to Me”, To Criticize the Critics and Other Writings, London,
Faber & Faber, 1965, p. 134.
24 Ivi.
25 Gozzi, Francesco, op. cit., pp. 291-93. 26 Eliot, Thomas S., The Sacred Wood cit., p. 44.
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a clerk in Lloyd’s Bank. There he began composing a fertile and substantial series of works which awarded him Ezra Pound’s announcement of having found an American poet who had “actually trained himself and modernized himself on his own”28.
“Il miglior fabbro” (“the better craftsman”) of the dedication of The Waste Land, his
friend and early mentor Ezra Pound, had exerted great shaping influence over Eliot’s initial production, as shown in his first important collection of poems, Prufrock and
Other Observations of 1917. This latter opus had rendered Eliot an esteemed
avant-garde poet, enough to allow him to become, in 1922, the editor of an innovative magazine of European literature, The Criterion, a quarterly journal intended for the maintenance of standards and the reunification of a European intellectual community29.
The thriving season was strengthened by his eminent role as editor for the publishers
Faber and Faber, which allowed Eliot to publish his writings and to encourage the
production of young and novice poets. These prosperous years were nonetheless characterized by the poor health conditions of Eliot’s wife, Vivien Haigh-Wood, a British ballet dancer whom he had married in 1915, despite his parents’ worries about her mental instability. Her worsened infirmity brought Eliot under considerable emotional strain, so as to undergo psychological treatment in a Swiss sanatorium in Lausanne, a place where he was able to peaceably complete the drafting of his glorious creation, The Waste Land, published in 192230.
The year 1927 validated his English affiliation, since Eliot became a British citizen and joined the Church of England, a fundamental decision that offered him some shelter from the despair of the modern world, which lacked faith and religion. His conversion was thus succeeded by the composition of a spiritual poetry which bloomed in Ash
28 Paige, D. D. (ed.), The Letters of Ezra Pound 1907-1941, London, Faber & Faber, 1951, p. 80. 29 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: La Terra Desolata, Milano, BUR Rizzoli, 1985, pp. 71-73. 30 Ivi.
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Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1935-42), and a successful play, Murder in the Cathedral (1935), a verse-drama which portrayed the assassination of Archbishop
Thomas Becket, and whose structure’s ritual formality and the set-piece neo-classical confrontations between Becket, his tempters and his murderers stemmed from Eliot’s ambition to renew poetic drama by exploring “a kind of doubleness in the action, as if it took place on two planes at once”31.32
“For his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry”33, Eliot was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948, not very long before he passed away in London, in 1965.
31 Eliot, Thomas S., Selected Essays cit., p. 229. 32 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., pp. 71-73.
33 Nwabunnia, Emeka, Emisi, Bishop E., The Nobel Prize (1901-2000): Handbook of Landmark
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Chapter II: The Waste Land 2.1 Introduction
In their Preface to the undergraduate volume of Oxford Poetry 1926, Charles Plumb and W. H. Auden brazenly stated that “if it is a natural preference to inhabit a room with casements opening upon Fairyland, one at least of them should open upon the Waste Land”1. One may assume, by reading this concise quotation, that Eliot’s poem is concerned with supernatural and unrealistic features which linguistically and thematically construct a troublesome but very intriguing text. However, the title does not grant any euphoric preconception, since the reader is instantly conveyed the image of a barren scenery which anticipates the rotten condition of a world that is reduced to a mere land. Here is the modern land, a tangled universe whose subjects and language escape any formal order or unity, composing a bunch of scattered and fragmentary realities, each inserted into a poem which withholds a hefty and singular account.
2.2 The genesis of the poem
The juvenile collection Poems 1920 contained a circumstantial composition which, perhaps, could be contemplated as the real prelude to the forthcoming Waste Land2.
Gerontion, a poem whose gerontic (“elderly”) protagonist emerges in the midst of a
post-war country described through a fraught dramatic monologue, gives voice to the opinions and impressions of a man whose conscience dilates until he becomes the
1 Plumb, Charles, Auden, Wystan H., ‘Preface’ to Oxford Poetry 1926, in Auden, Wystan H.,
Mendelson, Edward (ed.), The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose and Travel Books in Prose and
Verse, 1926-1938 (Volume 1), Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996, p. 3.
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emblem of the whole present world, under a thick network of historical and legendary references which incessantly oppose significant past epochs and the degraded contemporary scene. The protagonist represents the very first draft of Tiresias3, “the most important personage in the poem [The Waste Land], uniting all the rest”, the Greek prophet who is aware of “the substance of the poem” 4.
The relevance conferred to Tiresias, who actually constitutes the isolated speaker where the multiple voices of the poem intertwine, can be elucidated by his unifying function, since he qualifies as “the sum total of all experiences”5, the human conscience which accumulates and includes the thoughts and sensation of all people throughout history6. His pivotal prophetic agency, which “functions as Eliot’s ‘higher’ viewpoint, which will include and transmute the figures in The Waste Land”7, forms the backdrop to the ruined setting, which is shored up only with fragments: collective memories, legends, myths and texts all underpinning the intertextual mythical method8. This intra/intertextually relational and dialogic compositional method, which would consent an association between subject and object, present and past, reality and fiction, text and text, “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”9, a paralysed present whose chaos does not allow for a coherent narration, since each story seems to shatter in its extreme insignificance. The confrontation of various narrative sequences on literary and mythical paradigms permits, indeed, to construct a text upon
3 Ibidem, pp. 7-8.
4 Eliot, Thomas S., The Waste Land, in Collected Poems: 1909–1962, New York, Harcourt Brace &
World, 1963, p. 72.
5 Brooker, Jewel S., Bentley, Joseph, Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of
Interpretation, Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1990, p. 53.
6 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., p. 62.
7 Bentley, Joseph, Brooker, Jewel S., op. cit., p. 54 8 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., pp. 7-8.
9 Kermode, Frank, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich , 1975, pp.
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other existing works, so that "any text is the absorption and transformation of another"10.11
Eliot’s decision to employ such a peculiar compositional modality cannot ignore the encounter and literary partnership with his mentor Ezra Pound, whose collaboration encouraged the elaboration of the mythical method, and the consequent eradication of any element which could sound extraneous to that artistic technique12. Pound had certainly the merit of observing his friend’s creative activity with total discretion, especially during those years in which some of Eliot’s letters, dated 1919, were adumbrating the germinal allusions13 to the project of that long poem that would become The Waste Land14.
It was in October 1922 that The Waste Land was published in the United Kingdom in Eliot’s The Criterion, and a month later it also appeared in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. A subsequent copy, printed in December by the American editor Boni & Liverlight, appended some notes expressly written by the poet in order to give the volume consistency, a measure which proved to be fortunate as it benefitted the readers, by providing them with many clarifications and guiding them towards the dense intertextual network which characterised the arduous compositional method of the work15.
10 Moi, Toril, “Word, Dialog and Novel”, in Kristeva, Julia, Moi, Toril (ed.), The Kristeva Reader,
New York, Columbia University Press, 1986, p. 37.
11 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., pp. 6-7. 12 Ibidem, p. 9.
13 By 1921, Eliot was reporting to the rich collector and patron John Quinn that he had “a long poem
in mind and partly on paper which I am wishful to finish” [Ricks, Christopher, McCue, Jim (ed.), The
Poems of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: Collected and Uncollected Poems, London, Faber & Faber, 2015, p. 548].
14 Serpieri, Alessandro, op.cit., pp. 9-10. 15 Ibidem, p. 12.
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2.3 The Structure
While this latter intertextual structure outlines the architecture of the first half of the poem, where a symbolic stasis and a distorted use of language invade the splintered space, a relatively different method typifies the second half of the text, an allegorical method16 which actualises in the mythic-anthropological scheme that Eliot inferred from his reading of J. L. Weston’s From Ritual to Romance17. As he admitted in his very first note, “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested” by Weston’s book “on the Grail legend”18, a medieval legend in whose light the ancient fertility rites and myths are reconsidered so as to arrange the symbolic configuration on which The Waste Land is organized.
The title is actually a multiple metaphor which points to a world and a time both linked to the desolation that used to articulate the sterile, dark phase of the old fertility rites. In the first instance, in fact, the waste land is the winter land, in which the cycle of
16 The complexity of The Waste Land has compelled critics to question its broad meaning and unity,
demanding an analysis which has supplied over time a number of interpretations. Thematically, unity has been examined on an ideological, anthropological or narrative level. While the ideological perspective reads the poem as a text which reflects the disorder and decay of modern civilization, the anthropological account traces the harmony of the poem through incessant references to the archetypical symbolism of the Grail legend and of the fertility rites. The narrative hermeneutics deserves particular attention, since a variety of assumptions have been formulated on a difficult story that the poet would elliptically have miniaturized. George Williamson, for instance, proposed a narrative hermeneutics of the work: “Reduced to its simplest terms, The Waste Land is a statement of the experience that drives a character to the fortune-teller, the fortune that is told and the unfolding of that fortune” (cfr. Williamson, George, A
Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot, New York, Noonday Press, 1953, pp. 129-30). However, for a story to be
created, the existence of characters who act in sequences which are sympathetic and functional to a narrative line is required, and it appears evident that, within the poem, the different characters overlap, owning only symbolic functions, as declared by Eliot himself in his notes to lines 46 and 218. Nevertheless, it is true that, narratively, a quest akin to the one of the Grail legend transpires, although its route can only be identified in the last section. At a formal level, the unity of the poem has been mostly investigated through analogical explanations, as those which compare the compositional plan to musical compositions or to the contemporary experimentations in painting, from cubism to the assembly of
collages (cfr. “T. S. Eliot” in Curtius, Ernst R., Kowal, Michael, op. cit.), thus justifying the variety of the
themes in a serial (and not logical) progression. Yet, we must consider that the prospective simultaneity of the pictorial work, according to its spatial nature, cannot coincide with the temporal ‘simultaneity’ which the literary arts possess.
17 Ibidem, pp. 10-21.
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life seems to definitely cease, a cessation which must be ritually exorcised in order for spring to return and fertilise the earth through the blossoming of vegetation and of the crops19. Eliot derived these themes from “another work of anthropology, […] which has influenced our generation profoundly”20: Sir James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough, a monumental opus in twelve volumes whose studies enacted a systematic recognition of the antique vegetation ceremonies in the pre-Christian Mediterranean basin21.
Secondly, within the naturalistic and symbolic paradigm of the poem, the metaphor conveys an anthropological and historical meaning that may apply to diverse ages. Every age is different, but each one implies an equal recurrent scheme, which toggles between death and rebirth, decay and renovation22.
The desolation displayed within the text thus integrates every dark phase of a cyclical universal experience, although the historical period contemplated in The Waste Land exhibits a land which is definitely waste, so that rebirth and renovation do not seem to be looming. However, the anthropological permanence of symbolical schemes which could be related to various ages, and to the contemporary epoch as well, fascinated Eliot, who intuited a correlation between the ancient pagan rites and myths and the Christian legend23. It was Weston, indeed, who intended to demonstrate that the medieval legend of the quest for the Grail was not an original expression of Christian imagination, but it traced back to older mythologies and rituals, as she claimed to have been “struck by the resemblance existing between certain features of the Grail story, and characteristic details of the Nature Cults described”24.
19 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., p. 15.
20 Eliot, Thomas S., The Waste Land cit., p. 70. 21 Serpieri, Alessandro, op. cit., pp. 14-15. 22 Ibidem, p. 15.
23 Ibidem, pp. 16-18.
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The Grail legend essentially portrays a land which has been wrecked by a curse, since its king is insane, often impotent. In order for both land and king to be restored, the holy cup in which Joseph of Arimathea collected Jesus’ blood must be discovered, so a number of knights commence the quest, a roughly strenuous enterprise. Only the pure knight – Gawain or Parsifal – can reach the chapel or the castle where the Grail is guarded, answer the questions about the meaning of the cup and of the spear, and hence rescue the king and his desolate land25. Weston ascertained that the real spotlight of the legend was the king of the Grail, the Fisher King, strictly associated with pre-Christian god of vegetation cults, symbol of reproductive nature, who was sacrificed and allegorically resurrected as a pledge of life’s renewal on the earth26.
In Weston’s broad pattern, in the cyclical perspective based on numerous reticules of figurative analogies, e.g. the structurally precious analogy between the pagan and Christian spheres, Eliot implanted the situation of his time, of his waste land, according to an anthropological and literary intertextuality where all the elements ought to provide meaning not only in their interconnection, but also in their reference, within a universal symbolic frame27.
The analogical linkage of The Waste Land formally realises the unity of the poem, whose compositional plan features two distinct sections: the first one (vv. 1-306) marked by the fundamental traits of myth, history and paradox, and the second one (vv. 307-433) revolving around allegory. The relationship between the former and the latter part, which is also a contrast between symbolic stasis (or paralysis), with its relative communicative entropy, and allegorical dynamism (or resolution), with its relative
25 Invitto, Giovanni, Il sorriso di Medusa. Il consumo della paura tra cinema e filosofia, S. Cesario,
Manni, 2008, p. 76.
26 Ivi.
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restriction of meaning, constitutes the egregious architectural system of The Waste
Land28.
The symbolic structure of the three initial sections reflects a polysemy which is due to: a) the alternation of communication functions29, in particular the emotive (concerning the I), the conative (addressed to a you) and the metalinguistic (prevalently intertextual) functions, which intersect and preclude any logical consequentiality; b) the divergence which often occurs among various stylistic registers, for parodic purposes;
c) the distorted or paradoxical usage of symbols and mythical schemes, whereby a
constant dialectics between their positive and negative connotation is established; d) the counterpoint between myth and history, and among diverse historical eras30.
The symbolic stasis exists when the different functions of language paralyse one another, hence generating an expressive structure of semantic entropy, and enfeebling not only the literary code or the contemporary epoch, but also, and mostly, an entire cultural tradition, metaphorically represented by the mythical pattern of sterility and regeneration, whose dialectic appears to be overwhelmed and thereby unserviceable. Nevertheless, as the reading progresses, the emotive function cleanses itself of the paradoxes and retrieves the positive aspect of myth, while the conative function, which has gained a prophetic characterization, outweighs all the other communication functions, hence allowing the message to directly breach the symbolic stasis, which is
28 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: Le Strutture Profonde, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1973, p. 198
29 In his contribution at the conclusion of the interdisciplinary congress on style held at the Indiana
University in 1958, Jakobson identified six functions of language: a) emotive function, focused on the addresser of a speech act; b) phatic function, related to the channel through which the message is conveyed; c) conative function, directed to the addressee who participates and reacts in the communication; d) poetic function, linked to the message itself; e) metalinguistic function, concerning the code shared between addresser and receiver; f) referential function, associated to the context in which the conversation takes place (Sebeok, Thomas A., Style in Language, Cambridge, MIT, 1971, pp. 350-77).
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therefore transformed into an allegorical path that leads towards a transcendence, a dogmatic interpretation of the linguistic sign31.
2.4 The Themes
I dislike the word ‘generation’, which has been a talisman for the last ten years; when I wrote a poem called The Waste Land some of the more approving critics said that I had expressed the ‘disillusionment of a generation’, which is nonsense. I may have expressed for them their own illusion of being disillusioned, but that did not form part of my intention32.
The dissent disclosed by Eliot about the simplistic reading which, ideologically, had interpreted The Waste Land as the document of an ailing society or as the breakdown of an entire generation, muddles the hermeneutics of a text which only proposes contradictory aspects: does “the waste land” refer to this civilization, this land, or is the
whole history a “waste” experience, with its recurring seasons of squalor, unless the
blissful reawakening occurs33?
What bestows a topical unity on the poem is surely represented by the reiterated idea of the exploration of a desert which is both physical and descriptively urban, an inspection which no doubt characterizes the modern age, although tragic time spreads to the past as well. Present desolation is grosser, more vulgar, more alienated, deprived of the splendor which belonged to previous epochs; nonetheless, dreadful lands awaiting a redemption recur throughout history, since each epoch potentially constitutes a waste land: exile, estrangement, violence, sterility, deaths, are indeed omnipresent features34.
The materialistic vulgarity of the contemporary age, an era in which man is afraid of acting and reluctant to indulge in his own impulses, encouraged Eliot to emphasise a
31 Ibidem, p. 199.
32 Eliot, Thomas S. Selected Essays cit., p. 358.
33 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: La Terra Desolata cit., p. 37. 34 Ibidem, p. 39.
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sort of regret for the uncharted situations, an obscure exacerbation of smothered passions that involves whomever is fearful of life. “The men of this age are isolated from the current of Humanity: they have become almost entirely individuals, temporal units, ‘men’”35, whose ‘betweenness’ hints at the suspended universe of those Hollow
Men (1925) who exist in a limbo-status, “Between the idea / And the reality”, “Between
the conception / And the creation”. This slothful plight pertaining to the great and crowded modern cities, marks the existence of countless anonymous individuals, intent on pursuing the sterile routines of ordinary life, who have no faith in their own actions and thus fail every potential ideal36.
Only a death wish torments their conscience, and the epigraph to The Waste Land already appears to suggest the broad pernicious tone which envelopes the whole poem. Indeed, the anguished “ἀποθανεῖν θέλω” restlessly uttered by the Cumaean Sibyl epitomizes the necrosis of a society that is prevented from reviving, a society which is unable to operate, although a distant and illusive “Shantih”37 might adumbrate a glimmer of light.
2.4.1 Decay in a desert City
‘The Burial of the Dead’, the first section of the poem, introduces the civilisation of The
Waste Land, one which oddly considers April “the cruellest month” (1), incapable of
rejoicing in the new birth and regeneration that warm spring will bring, preferring on the contrary the barrenness of the dead winter. Winter is actually the season which “kept
35 Moore, Edward, We Moderns: Enigmas and Guesses, London, G. Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1918, p.
125.
36 Wilson, Edmund, Axel’s Castle, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1931, pp. 102-06.
37 Eliot, Thomas S., The Waste Land cit., vs. 433. Subsequent references to The Waste Land will be
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us warm” (5), a semantically deviating assertion whose paradoxical implication is directly related to the frigid and resigned atmosphere of the world Eliot manages to represent: in this land, generation is not possible, and men are bound to be satisfied with cold emotions, their only attitude being inactivity and uncertainty. Tied both to the past and to the future, oscillating between “memory and desire” (3), these individuals are not capable of living in the present, suspended in a state of expectancy which fills their meaningless existences only “with dried tubers” (7), and covers their shriveled earth “in forgetful snow” (6)38.
The usual connection between April and the rebirth of Nature is therefore cracked, and the title of the section seems to highlight this fracture39, through its multiple references to a mournful circumstance: ‘The Burial of the Dead’ specifically indicates the memorial service celebrated according to the Anglican rite (whose appellation is The
Order for The Burial of the Dead). It also mythologically evokes the burial of the effigy
of the god, which represented a pledge of resurgence in the fertility rites; but notably, the headline relates to the burial of the dead in the modern world, as a metaphorical sepulture of hollow men who refuse to awaken to the drama of life40.
Their own dry existences, craving for that “shower of rain” (9) which does not seem to pour down, deprive these men of water, the only natural element through which their physical and spiritual regeneration may eventuate. In their scenery, which rapidly looms
38 Williamson, George, op. cit., p. 125.
39 As opposed to the notorious incipit to the Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
(“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droughte of March hath perced to the roote / And bathed every veyne in swich licour / Of which vertu engendred is the flour”), or to an anonymous Elisabethan
song which surely Eliot was familiar with (“Spring, the year’s spring, is the year’s pleasant king; / Then
blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring. / […] Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing, / Cuckoo, Jug-jug, pu-wee, to witta-woo”), the old conventional tradition which exalted spring as a symbol of new life is here upset, simultaneously reversing both the mythical-ritualistic and the liturgical archetype that ensue. In particular, the sacramental function of the burial of the dead which reflects on Christ’s resurrection, alters to a fateful function of unearthing of the living or of the ‘dead in life’, who are symbolically represented by contemporary men, a civility in crisis, prey to anguish and fear.
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as a desert landscape, “the dry stone” gives “no sound of water” (24), and the “red rock” under whose shelter the “son(s) of man” (20) are fervidly summoned, is able to grant a mere “shadow” (25). Indubitably, the solemn tenor of the stanza (19-30), which invokes a prophetic and admonishing ambience41, unveils the religious drought of a modern humanity that has discarded any trace of faith, the metaphysical despair of a contemporary world where the Church (the “red rock”) has relinquished its spiritual authority, and where men have embraced the glooming guidance of a shadow. The compulsive reiteration of this term cannot impede an interesting parallelism with the frustrating “Shadow” of fear which, “Between the essence / And the descent”, “falls” in the realm of the abovementioned Hollow Men, a lethal shade which eventually destroys their world, consuming it to “a handful of dust” (30).
A heap of “broken images” (22) and “stony rubbish” (20) exemplify the squalid atmosphere of The Waste Land, whose decay its inhabitants begin to unravel as soon as their profiles start being recognized. A woman, a profane fortune-teller who acts as a counterpoint to (and as a counterfeit of) the former biblical caution, is introduced as “the wisest woman in Europe” (45), parading her “wicked pack of cards” (46) along with its mysterious depictions. Apparently incapable of revealing anything relevant in connection to the world she unveils, the clairvoyant, who clearly represents modern fakery, wields a pack of tarots which are deeply connected with fertility rites and folklore, portraying “the people we will encounter as shady, damaged, players in an
41 Cfr. Ezekiel, 2, 1-3: “He said to me, ‘Son of man, stand up on your feet and I will speak to you’. As
he spoke, the Spirit came into me and raised me to my feet, and I heard him speaking to me. He said: ‘Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites, to a rebellious nation that has rebelled against me; they and their ancestors have been in revolt against me to this very day’”. Since “son of man” typically characterises biblical passages, we can suppose that Eliot chose to allude to this specific excerpt because of the warning mission conferred to the prophet, who shall bring the rebel sons of Israel back to Yahweh. The resolute rebel men of The Waste Land are thus exhorted to reroute their lives to the just path which leads them to salvation.
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unexplained but ominous drama”42, and yielding a baneful advice, “Fear death by water” (55), which predicts the calamitous catastrophe that will occur in the fourth section of the poem, namely ‘Death by Water’43.
Sosostris’s caution anticipates the death which appears to be impending on those “crowds of people, walking round in a ring” (56) in the dreadful and obscure “Unreal City” (60), whose bridges are traversed by noxious and stained water. The immense crowd that “flowed over London Bridge” (62) in a cold, hazy morning, has already been “undone”44 (63) by the ineluctable death45, which even permeates this “Unreal City”, the modern English megalopolis that contrasts the previous desert space, and whose citizens repeat their monotonous activities in a tedious routine. The unreality of the town, which allegedly exposes its ordinary subjects along with its familiar and authentic spots46, arises from the mournful tone and lexicon that mark this last stanza of the section, where the music scans funereal moments, and the words construct a lugubrious situation, so as to transform the urban landscape into a subterranean Hell.
42 Gish, Nancy K., The Waste Land: A Poem of Memory and Desire, Boston, Twayne Publishers,
1988, p. 54.
43 Cechinel, André, “Constructed Waste: Eliot’s Madame Sosostris”, Acta Scientiarum, XXXV, 1,
2013, p. 14.
44 Cfr. Dante’s Inferno, III, 55-57: “[…] sì lunga tratta / di gente, ch’io non avrei creduto / che morte
tanta n’avesse disfatta” (“so long a line / of people, that I never would have thought / that death so great a number had undone”).
45 Lines 62-63 oppose the flow of the numerous living (the crowd), which by analogy may refer to the
flux of flourishing life, to the threat of a lone and imminent death, which annihilates “so many” individuals, in a chiasmus-like structure that ignites and immediately extinguishes the glimmer of vitality which the sentence seemed to disclose.
46 “The ‘unreal City’ of The Waste Land is obviously London, […] but ‘City’, with a capital C, has
another meaning […]: it denotes the ancient City of London, a smaller area along the north bank of the Thames, which contains modern London’s financial district and most of England’s mercantile and monetary power. It is the English Wall Street, with identical connotations” (Day, Robert A., “The ‘City Man’ in The Waste Land: The Geography of Reminiscence”, Modern Language Association, LXXX, 3, 1965, p. 286). We can imagine the depictions of this stanza as the typical City man’s routine: his boring pilgrimage towards his office among a jammed crowd, the roads (as King William Street) he is used to crossing up and down, and the exact place he must reach in order to start his working day (specifically, St. Mary Woolnoth). This description would sound appropriate for a man like Eliot, who, by necessity, worked as a bank clerk, and confessed to having often noticed this phenomenon (i.e. the flowing of the crowd).
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The “sighs, short and infrequent” (64) that each man exhales, while fixing “his eyes before his feet” (65), surely remind of the quiet and meaningless dried voices that the hollow, stuffed men whispered, “leaning together”, waiting to cross “with direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom”. They reprint as well Dante’s infernal damned, whose trembling sighs echoed in the agonising, tormenting air47. It is that air silencieux which imbues the contemporary world, the monstrous Baudelairean Ennui which torments each individual, whose unbearable lives and melancholic breaths partake all in the same, terrible desolation48.
As the municipal scenery thickens with human elements, the discourse narrows its angle until the setting evolves into an exquisitely domestic context. The following section, ‘A Game of Chess’49, intensifies the sterility of human relationships, accurately opposing the aristocratic and proletarian classes, which nonetheless share an equal degraded condition. Indeed, the homely circumstance which would welcome a typical dialogue between two family members, as the ceaseless imperatives or questions suggest, ends up revealing its illusory and inexistent grounds, propounding a corroded model of communication which has achieved its apical crisis.
A neurotic lady, whose disturbed and syncopate speech articulates through the complementary modes of questioning and ordering, filled only with fear, grief and
47 Cfr. Dante’s Inferno, IV, 25-27: “Quivi, secondo che per ascoltare, / non avea pianto mai che di
sospiri, / che l’aura etterna facevan tremare” (“Therein, as far as one could judge by list’ning, / there was no lamentation, saving sighs / which caused a trembling in the eternal air”).
48 Cfr. Baudelaire’s Au Lecteur in Les Fleurs du Mal: “C’est l’Ennui! - l’œil chargé d’un pleur
involontaire, / Il rêve d’échafauds en fumant son houka. / Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat, / - Hypocrite lecteur, - mon semblable, - mon frère!” (“Boredom! He smokes his hookah, while he dreams / Of gibbets, weeping tears he cannot smother. / You know this dainty monster, too, it seems - / Hypocrite reader! - You! - My twin! - My brother!”).
49 The title of the section traces the homonymous Thomas Middleton’s comedy (1624), although
punctual reference concerns another drama by the same author, Women beware Women, where the young Bianca, virtuous and faithful to her husband until then, succumbs to the duke’s seduction, while the widow Livia, in the foreground, plays a game of chess with Bianca’s mother-in-law in order to distract her; each of their moves denotes a seductive stage.
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boredom, appears to be talking to a presumable interlocutor, whose responses, which correspond to the adversary’s moves in the symbolic game of chess, acquire an allegoric nuance in the key of death and passive expectancy, moving on the three temporal axes proposed by the woman: indeed, the first statement “I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones” (115-116) openly manifests a forlorn present, which was preceded by a remote past where no metamorphosis could happen, and which will be followed by an alienated future that will indefinitely recur, where men will be “waiting for a knock upon the door” (138)50.
The broken syntax and the dysphoric semantics emphasized in the stanza (111-138) trigger the idea of a flawed communication, one in which a sense of stalemate covers the whole message, where speakers ignore whether they are “alive, or not” (126), and where “nothing” simply constitutes what men “know, see, remember” (122). The blatant vacuity of life and the unbearable boredom that the spasmodic mosaic of queries and commands hectically portrays, are well matched by a barren psychological breakdown and sensation of imprisonment in an empty existence of monotony and crushing narrowness, where
the mind is exercised on petty considerations and the eyes are fixed languidly and helplessly on the move and counter-move of the game, intellectual as well sexual, and the weary heart waits for some violence which may knock this life to pieces or death itself which may put an end to this stale and aimless existence. But this weary waiting has no hope51.
The “lack of telling” (155) and the failed connection which affect people are nonetheless countervailed by the moral, righteous elocution of a Nature which perpetually intersects with the human realm, continually framing a “juxtaposition of
50 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: La Terra Desolata cit., pp. 100-01.
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spaces that are geographically distinct but temporally simultaneous”52. The opening line of ‘The Fire Sermon’53, the third section of The Waste Land, pierces the flippancy of human speech through an impetuous but silent tableau that recreates the initial desert setting, where “a heap of broken images” exemplified the bare bedrock of the entire land.
Instead of abstract images, what is broken here is a tangible “river’s tent” (173), an item that doubly implies both a naturalistic definition, which offers the autumnal image of the despoliation of the tree foliage, and a biblical meaning, whereby the tent was assimilated to the tabernacle in a civilization, as among the people of Israel, who used to peregrinate in the desert wilderness and exploited the tents as portable places of worship54. Once again, a simple “brown land” (175) predominates over the stark territory, weaving temporal connections and spatial overlaps which keep on contrasting a lost, memorable time to a besetting, rubbishy world.
The pictures intermingle, the narrative levels out in an astounding chronological and physical blurring: “the nymphs are departed” (175), depriving the contemporary age of a mythical, dazzling decency which is now replaced by “empty bottles, sandwich papers, / silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends” (177-178), all nasty testimonies of the squalid, contaminated spectacle of the urban civilization55. “These distinct spaces”, city and desert, “brought into relations of contiguity by the poem’s spatial story”, cause the aridity of The Waste Land’s desert to transmute itself “into a
52 Morrison, Spencer, “Mapping and Reading the Cityscape”, in McIntire, Gabrielle (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 27.
53 The title refers to the Fire Sermon preached by Buddha against luxury and the diverse passions
which agitate man’s soul.
54 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: La Terra Desolata cit., p. 104. 55 Ibidem, p. 105.
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cultural and spiritual aridity within city life produced by material decadence”56, therefore constructing an intricate link between material space and subjectivity itself.
The wistful subject of the excerpt, sitting down and weeping “by the waters of Leman”57, establishes a prompt connection between the desert basin and the waters of the urban “sweet Thames” (176), which actually cumulates only filthy garbage and shines with dull colours. The slimy canal paves the way to a gloomy description, which insulates the fishing man and surrounds him with spectral components, in a creepy atmosphere made of “rattle of (the) bones, and chuckle spread from ear to ear” (186). The phonological and rhythmical arrangement of the following lines (187-195), then, percusses the dysphoric aspect of the context, where the ground is encircled by rats that paradoxically creep “softly through the vegetation” (187), by “white bodies naked” that lie “on the low damp ground” (193) and “bones cast in a little low dry garret, / Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year” (194-195).
The deathly outlook, which deceptively relegates such an awful contingency to a secluded, implausible experience, is foreshadowed by “the sound of horns and motors” (197) of that “Unreal City”, which arises again, under the same “brown fog of a winter noon” (208). As a perfectly specular image of the initial section, the city under discussion unveils a second, majestic soothsayer, Tiresias58, whose prophetic eminence
56 Morrison, Spencer, op. cit., p. 27.
57 The whole line 182 echoes the words of Psalm 137, 1, which recalls the exile to Babylon (“By the
rivers of Babylon we sat and wept / when we remembered Zion”), entailing a further commemoration of those distant, austere times whose nostalgic absence marks the entire stanza (vv. 173-186). Interestingly, the city of Lausanne, where Eliot concluded the first draft of the poem, faces on Lake Leman.
58 “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a ‘character’, is yet the most important
personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The whole passage from Ovid is of great anthropological interest: «‘Cum Iunone iocos et maior vestra profecto est / Quam, quae contingit maribus’, dixisse, ‘voluptas’. / Illa negat; placuit quae sit sententia docti / Quaerere Tiresiae: venus huic erat utraque nota. / Nam duo magnorum viridi coeuntia silva / Corpora serpentum baculi violaverat ictu / Deque viro factus, mirabile, femina septem / Egerat autumnos; octavo rursus eosdem / Vidit et 'est vestrae si tanta potentia plagae’, / Dixit ‘ut auctoris sortem
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Eliot enhanced as constituting the unifying center of the poem, at once man and woman, clairvoyant and blind, mythical figure and modern conscience (the poet himself). However, the fortune-teller is now being dismissed from his arcane and sacred role, since the unique, different future that he is able to foresee, and that his own mythical destiny denies him, is death. Indeed, Tiresias does not see the heroic or the tragic, but the typical and the vulgar, the “substance of the poem” which eventually materializes in the chaotic, popular scene of a ruined world59.
Paradoxically depicted as “a taxi throbbing waiting” (217), Tiresias is a mythical figure transferred to the modern age, whose ability to see and feel beyond the present time, “throbbing between two lives” (218), grants the achievement of a synchronic and
transhistorical60 perspective, an overbearing annihilation of chronological distance, the attainment of that “historical sense” which “involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence”61. Tiresias is the “old man” who, suspended in his atemporal dimension, translates in his constant presence that specific simultaneity of in contraria mutet, / Nunc quoque vos feriam!’ percussis anguibus isdem / Forma prior rediit genetivaque venit imago. / Arbiter hic igitur sumptus de lite iocosa / Dicta Iovis firmat; gravius Saturnia iusto / Nec pro materia fertur doluisse suique / Iudicis aeterna damnavit lumina nocte, / At pater omnipotens (neque enim licet inrita cuiquam / Facta dei fecisse deo) pro lumine adempto / Scire futura dedit poenamque levavit honore’»” (Eliot, Thomas S., The Waste Land cit., pp. 72-73). [“Jove, they say, was happy and feeling pretty good (with wine) forgetting anxiety and care, and killing time joking with Juno. ‘I maintain,’ he told her ‘you females get more pleasure out of loving than we poor males do, ever.’ She denied it, so they decided to refer the question to wise Tiresias’ judgment: he should know what love was like, from either point of view. Once he had come upon two serpents mating in the green woods, and struck them from each other, and thereupon, from man was turned into woman, and was a woman seven years, and saw the serpents once again, and once more struck them apart, remarking: ‘If there is such magic in giving you blows, that man is turned into woman, it may be that woman is turned to man. Worth trying.’ And so he was a man again; as umpire, he took the side of Jove. And Juno was a bad loser, and she said that umpires were always blind, and made him so forever. No god can over-rule another’s action, but the Almighty Father, out of pity, in compensation, gave Tiresias power to know the future, so there was some honor along with punishment” [Ovid, Metamorphoses (transl. by Rolphe Humphries): “The Story of Tiresias”, Book III, Lines 318-43].
59 Serpieri, Alessandro, T. S. Eliot: La Terra Desolata cit., p. 111.
60 Cfr. Charles Martindale: “A text has to be treated both as transhistorical and as contingent on a
particular moment of history” (Martindale, Charles, Redeeming the Text: Latin Poetry and the
Hermeneutics of Reception. Roman Literature and Its Contexts, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1993, p. 104).
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space, time and styles, attending the narrated events with a completely resigned detachment62. Perceiving the scene and foretelling the rest (229), witnessing both past and present, he is thus able to perceive the true essence of art, which, nonetheless, in the contemporary noxious world, becomes a mayhem of fractured, dramatic scenes, which his eye is able to minimally scrutinize and coordinate. In fact, “Tiresias’s central experience is the witnessing of death, sexual violence, and devastation on an immense scale”63, foresuffering the modern wilderness and carrying, as a prophet, the burden of perceiving injuries that are yet to come. However, his doubleness “lies in his being simultaneously the man who suffers and the artist who creates”64, in whose mind ordinary men’s experiences are always shaping new synchronic, ideal orders.
Tiresias is personally involved in those repugnant, traumatic experiences, as the voluptuous encounter that implicates a typist at the hands of a “young man carbuncular” (231), an “expected guest” whom he “too awaited” (230), the subject of a trivial episode that “I, Tiresias, have foresuffered” (243). “By signaling his own suffering”, Tiresias “thus blurs identities” and occupies “the subject positions of the poem’s other victims”65, humans who deliberately embroil themselves in vicious circumstances and consequently, when “that’s done”, are shamefully “glad it’s over” (252). The vacuous and miserable existence of modern individuals, depersonalised subjects “separated from all things by a hollow space”66, who constantly endeavor to saturate their “life with a hole in it”67, eventually escaping from themselves, letting their lives be plunged down
62 Crivelli, Matteo, “La sperimentazione del collage nella ‘Waste Land’ di T. S. Eliot”, Annali della
Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia, LXIII, 2, 2010, pp. 213-42.
63 Badenhausen, Richard, “Trauma and Violence in The Waste Land”, in McIntire, Gabrielle (ed.), The
Cambridge Companion to the Waste Land, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 150.
64 Smith, Stan, op. cit., p. 141.
65 Badenhausen, Richard, op. cit., p. 151.
66 Kafka, Franza, “Diaries 1911”, in Brod, Max (ed.), The Diaries of Franz Kafka 1910-1913, London,
Secker & Warbur, 1948, p. 180.
