Priya Chakraborty

The Use of Myths in Eliot’s in The Waste Land Eliot may have been self-deprecatory in his opinion of ‘The Waste Land’ calling it a “a piece of rhythmical grumbling” but the poem has often been interpreted as a commentary -that is at once temporal and timeless- on the sick soul of the Western man, depicting the spritual chaos of the European society during the years following the 1st World War, which appeared to many sensitive observers as a holocaust of those moral and spiritual values that had formed the cornerstone of the social structure since the dawn of history. Eliot depicts this chaos in ‘The Waste Land’ through the 'mythical method' as opposed to the conventional narrative method. In the latter, there is a story which advances, through logical stages, to a fixed destination. But in the mythical method, where the stages are birth, death, re-birth, the movement is not progressive but circular. The structure thus may be figured as a series of concentric circles moving round the basic theme of death-rebirth, juxtaposing the past with the present. Eliot acknowledged his debt to two works of anthropology: Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance. The Golden Bough being an encylopaedic study of primitive life, influenced to a great extent the modern literary interest in myth and ritual. In his notes to ‘The Waste Land’, Eliot says that it ‘has influenced our generation profoundly.’ Frazer’s work lay within the scope of rational and scientific understanding demonstrating that religion was a product of the mind and not something that had been supernaturally revealed. His researches showed that the myth underlying primitive fertility cults in different cultures and historical epochs was that of the dying and resurrected god. Ultimately, Frazer’s thesis is that Christianity evolved from the myth of the death and the resurrection of the vegetation deity, and from the ritual of killing the sacred king in primitive myths and rites. Frazer’s work was significant for Eliot because it demonstrated the continuity between the primitive and the civilized and revealed the substratum of savagery and violence beneath the surface of civilization. Like Frazer, Jessie Weston attempted as well to explain the evolution of religious belief in her study of the Grail legend. The lost Grail and the search for it became an archetypal symbol of the quest for spiritual truth, especially in medieval romances about King Arthur and his knights.Weston also discusses the striking resemblance between certain features of the Grail legend and characteristic details of the nature cults of the dying and resurrected gods described by Frazer. In a statement which has become almost as famous as the poem, Eliot suggested that The Golden Bough offered Eliot a framework of myth with which to structure and order experience in much the same way that the Odyssey had done for Joyce’s Ulysses: “In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him…it simply is 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…and The Golden Bough concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.” Between the poet’s first mention of “broken images” and his last mention of “fragments,” he assembles a number of fragments and broken images which constitute the poem. The bulk of imagery consists of two major categories-firstly, those drawn from myth, ritual and religion, and secondly, those taken from the common aspects of urban life, quite trite in appearance, but raised to the great intensity by the emotional pressure behind them. The basic symbol used in the poem, is taken, of course, from Miss Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. In the legends which she treats there, the land has been blighted by a curse. The crops do not grow, and the animals cannot reproduce. The plight of the land is summed up by, and connected with, the plight of the lord of the land, the Fisher King(whom Eliot in his notes arbitrarily associates with the man with the three staves), who has been rendered impotent by maiming or sickness. The curse can only be removed by the appearance of a knight who will ask the meanings of the various symbols which are displayed to him in the castle. The poem shows a shift in meaning from physical to spiritual sterility. A knowledge of this symbolism is, as Eliot has already pointed out, essential for an understanding of the poem. In the course of time the legend was blended with the story of the Grail- which was the cup used by Christ at The Last Supper in which Joseph of Arimathea caught the blood from the wound in Christ’s side at the time of crucifixion. It was soon discovered that the vessel had medicinal and miraculous properties and steps were at once taken to build temples for organising the worship of the holy vessel. But a time came when this holy relic of Christianity disappeared mysteriously and the search for the Grail eventually became an allegory man’s quest for truth or spiritual realization. Tennyson adopted the Grail story as the finale of his Idylls of the King making Sir Galahad, the immaculate knight of King Arthur’s Round Table, as the leader destined to succeed in his holy mission. In other subsequent versions that appeared in Germany and France, the protagonist however is Sir Perceival(Parsifal) but the outline of the legend remains the same. The knight must be sexually pure and he should march, through the trials and tribulations to the old Grail temple in the kingdom known as Chapel Perilous, where he must put and answer questions about the holy Grail and the holy lance that pierced the side of Christ. This was to be followed by the ritual of the washing of the maimed king’s feet before the advent of the blessed rain, announcing the return of fertility to the king and to his dry kingdom. BURIAL OF THE DEAD AND INTRO TO THE MYTHS The first section of "The Burial of the Dead" develops the theme of the attractiveness of death, or of the difficulty in rousing oneself from the death in life in which the people of the waste land live. Men are afraid to live in reality. April, the month of rebirth, is not the most joyful season but the cruelest. Winter at least kept them warm in forgetful snow. The Spring stands for rebirth and winter for death; drought is symbolic of spiritual dryness and rain of spiritual fertility; the hard rock breaking under the sun may typify spiritual disintegration, while water and fish clearly symbolize fertility of spirit. Eliot introduces the reader to the mythical world of mankind through the figure of Madame Sosostris the “famous clairvoyante” that calls for further reference to Miss Weston's book. As Miss Weston has shown, the Tarot cards were originally used to determine the event of the highest importance to the people, the rising of the waters. Madame Sosostris has fallen a long way from the high function of her predecessors. She is engaged merely in vulgar fortune-telling but the the symbols of the Tarot pack are still unchanged. She finds that her client’s card is that of the drowned Phoenician Sailor, and so she warns him “Fear death by water.”, not realizing any more than do the other inhabitants of the modern waste land that the way into life may be by death itself. There is no drowned sailor in the Tarot pack. Of the cards that she finds for her client, the motif of the man with the three staves, the hanged man and the Phoenician sailor keep recurring through out the poem, evoking again and again the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. CONTINUITY OF PAST AND PRESENT THROUGH THE BATTLE AND THE WAR The sense of continuity of the primitive and the civilized in the recurrence of violence and savagery through the ages is prevalent in ‘The Waste Land’. The reference to the battle of Mylae(fought between Rome and Carthage in 260.B.C) in line 70, through the figure of Stetson who was with the speaker “in the ships at Mylae!” equates the First World War with the battle of Mylae. The section also stresses the connection between war and loss of life, modern London and the ancient fertility rites: "That corpse you planted last year in your garden,/Has it begun to sprout?" refers also to the buried god of the old fertility rites. It also is to be linked with the earlier passage-"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow,". This allusion to the buried god accounts for the ironical, almost taunting tone of the passage. The burial of the dead is now a sterile planting-without hope. And the barbaric cries of modern life are heard in the ‘sound of horns and motors, which shall bring/ Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring.’- another case of sterile existence. HANGED GOD, HOODED FIGURE AND CHAPEL PERILOUS The fifth section of the poem, Eliot thought, was “not only the best part, but the only part that justifies the whole, at all”.(Letter of 15 October 1923 to Bertrand Russell). The Hanged Man, who represents the hanged god of Frazer (including the Christ), Eliot states in a note, is associated with the hooded figure of Christ who was crucified on a cross, appears in "What the Thunder Said." with the disciples to Emmaus. According to Frazer’s account, Attis was said to have perished under a pine tree, and was annually represented by an effigy hung upon a pine. Frazer conjectured that in the old days the priest who bore the name and played the part of Attis at the spring festival was regularly hanged or slain upon the sacred tree. While the reference to the "torchlight red on sweaty faces'' and to the "frosty silence in the gardens" obviously associates, as we have already pointed out, Christ in Gethsemane with the other hanged gods. The god has now died, and in referring to this, the basic theme finds another strong restatement: "Who is the third who walks always beside you?" Eliot thus merges the biblical story of the journey to Emmaus is told in Luke XXIV, 13-31, Christ’s resurrection with the resurrection motif of the hanged god. The story goes: two disciples were travelling on the road to Emmaus(a village near Jerusalem) on the day of Christ’s resurrection and discussing the events that had happened. The risen Christ joins them and explains to them all the things in the scriptures concerning himself in order to convince them that his death and resurrection were in full accord with the divine plan. However, the disciples do not recognize him until he blesses their evening meal and vanishes out of their sight. The god has returned, has risen, but the travelers cannot tell whether it is really he, or mere illusion induced by their delirium. The gods in the modern waste land have reduced the state of sacrificial victims, beyond the people’s recognition. Incidentally the poem glances at the biblical waste land, a land without water, a desert scattered with bones, awaiting the life giving breath of god. Finally, the approach to Chapel Perilous, described by Jessie Weston, is the final stage of the Grail quest. The quester meets with a strange and terrifying adventure is a mysterious chapel before going on to Grail Castle itself. Sometimes there is a ‘Dead Body’ laid on an altar; sometimes a ‘Black Hand’ extinguishes the tapers; and there are strange and threatening voices. This is apparently an adventure which is fraught with extreme danger to life, and in which supernatural and evil forces are engaged. But: In this decayed hole among the mountains In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home. The Grail quest, like the failure of the disciples to recognize their god, does not reach any resolution. The quester is left in the Chapel- the Castle does not appear, nor does the Grail. Like the motif of the fertility gods, the motif of failed or unfulfilled attempts of seeking the holy Grail is intermittent in the poem. SYRIAN MERCHANTS AND THEIR MODERN COUNTERPART According to From Ritual to Romance The Syrian merchants were, with slaves and soldiers, the principal carriers of the mysteries which lie at the core of the Grail legends. But Mr. Eugenides the Smyrna merchant corresponds to the Fool in the Tarot pack of Madame Sosostris. In the modern world however, both the representatives of the Tarot divining and the mystery cults in decay. What he carries on his back and what the fortune-teller was forbidden to see is evidently the knowledge of the mysteries (although Mr. Eugenides himself is hardly likely to be more aware of it than Madame Sosostris is aware of the importance of her function). Mr. Eugenides, in terms of his former function ought to be inviting the protagonist to an initiation into the esoteric cult which holds the secret of life, but on the realistic surface of the poem, he: Asked me in demotic French To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. He is really inviting him to a homosexual debauch. The homosexuality is "secret" and now a "cult" but a very different cult from that which Mr. Eugenides ought to represent. The end of the new cult is not life but, ironically, sterility. WATER AS A SYMBOL OF LIFE AND DEATH BY WATER Eliot’s use of myth is indeterminate and not schematic. Water, for instance, the agent of physical and spiritual regeneration, is recontextualised as a symbol in the course of the poem. There are numerous allusions to death by drowning without any suggestion of a subsequent revival.. The figure of the Phoenician sailor reappears in part IV of the poem ‘Death by Water’ as Phlebas the Phoenician sailor. This section is centered on associations of water with mortality and the motifs of death by drowning-the drowned god of fertility cults. Phlebas the Phoenician is associated with the ‘drowned Phoenician Sailor’, with the ‘one-eyed merchant’(the Fool of the Tarot deck) and with Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant. There is perhaps a parallel with Frazer’s and Weston’s description of the cult of Adonis- the Greek deity of Phoenician origin. In Alexandria each year an effigy of the head of the god was, with every show of mourning thrown into the sea, and borne within seven days by a current to Byblos, where it was received and welcomed with rejoicing. The ceremony enacted the death and resurrection of the god. In ‘Death by Water’, however, the emphasis is again on death, and not on the hope of rebirth into a new life. Phlebas in fact parodies the resurrection of the fertility god ”He passed the stages of his age and youth” as he moves through the stages of his age and youth. Eliot uses the device of memento mori as a sombre reminder of human mortality. At least, with a kind of hindsight, one may suggest that "Section IV" gives an instance of the conquest of death and time, the "perpetual recurrence of determined seasons," the "world of spring and autumn, birth and dying" through death itself. FIRE SERMON AND FISHER KING Eliot upholds the picture of barren spirituality and its quest in ‘The Fire Sermon’, part III of the poem in the line where the speaker says: “While I was fishing in the dull canal”. The castle of the Fisher King was always located on the banks of a river or on the sea shore. The title "Fisher King," Miss Weston shows, originates from the use of the fish as a fertility or life symbol. The reference to fishing is part of the realistic detail of the scene but to the reader who knows the Weston references, the reference is to that of the Fisher King of the Grail legends. The protagonist is the maimed and impotent king of the legends. Eliot proceeds now to tie the waste-land symbol to that of The Tempest, by quoting one of the lines spoken by Ferdinand, Prince of Naples, but he alters The Tempest passage somewhat, writing not, "Weeping again the king my father's wreck," but: Musing upon the king my brother's wreck And on the king my father's death before him. It is possible that the alteration has been made to bring the account taken from The Tempest into accord with the situation in the Percival stories. In \Wolfram von Eschenbach's Pdrzival, for instance, Trevrezent, the hermit, is the brother of the Fisher King, Anfortas. He tells Parzival, "His name all men know as Anfortas, and I weep for him evermore." Their father, Frimutel, is of course dead. After the lines from The Tempest, appears again the image of a sterile death from which no life comes, the bones, "rattled by the rat's foot only, year to year."- suggesting a hopeless world devoid of hope for spiritual elevation. The protagonist is identified with the Fisher King and the quester. The matter is complicated further by the fact that in some versions of the legend the land is laid waste because of the quester’s inability to ask the right questions concerning the Grail, and not because of the king’s infirmity. Eliot subverts the Grail legend as he alludes to a ballad popular among the Australian troops in the First World War: O the moon shines bright on Mrs Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water The poet substitutes the figure of Parsifal with that of Sweeney, a vulgar, sensual man and Mrs Porter a brothel keeped in Cairo- hardly a type of chastity. Eliot refers the reader to the sonnet ‘Parsifal’ by Paul Verlaine where Parsifal having conquered the temptation of lust and cured the king of his wound, adores the Grail and hears the voices of children singing in the dome. Before he heals Amfortas, the king, Parsifal’s feet are bathed with water from the holy spring by the now repentant temptress Kundry. The ceremonial washing of feet is parodied in the lines “Mrs Porter… And her daughter… wash their feet in soda water”. Thus the legend of the Fisher King, becomes a fit analogue for the tale of modern humanity and its waste land a physical counterpart of the spiritual sterility in the contemporary world; and thus also rain and drought become primary symbols of spiritual fertility and sterility. But in order to give a universal and timeless dimension to the modern waste land the poet has subsumed, under the principle myth of the Fisher King, three other legends with classical, biblical and Indian associations. The classical tragedies of Sophocles Oedipus Tyrranus Tiresias is the blind withered prophet who knows that Thebes has been cursed because of Oedipus’ parricide and subsquent incestuous marriage to his mother, despite the fact of his ignorance of the identity of both his parents. In ‘The Waste Land’ Tiresias is specifically hermaphroditic:”I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs...”. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses Tiresias was transformed into a woman for hitting a pair of snakes while they were copulating, seven years later he repeated his action seeing the same pair of snakes and was thus transformed back into a man. Since he had been both a man and a woman he was asked to settle a quarrel between Jove and Juno, as to who derives more pleasure man or woman; when Tiresias took Jove’s side that woman gets more pleasure, Juno struck him blind. As a compensation Jove gave him long life and a gift of prophecy. In some versions of the myth, Tiresias has a special staff to guide him in his blindness, this staff connects him with the “the man with the three staves” from the Tarot pack and his sterility symbolically connects him with Fisher King. His bisexuality highlights the theme of mobility and indeterminacy of sexual identity. In ‘The Waste Land’, “Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the Rest… and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.” Tiresias acts as a tragic chorus to the scene in the typist girl’s apartment. The incident between the typist and the carbuncular young man is a picture of "love" so exclusively and practically pursued that it is not love at all. Tiresias however is not the unifying consciousness of the poem, as Eliot’s note would have it. His point of view too is subject to scrutiny. In fact, the voyeuristic Tiresias with his dedicated sensibility is symptomatic of the moribund civilisation of which he is a spectator. Like Dante’s augurs and diviners, Tiresias can only look back and is denied a vision of the future. Eliot’s representation also stresses the simultaneity of time. The episode of the typist girl and the clerk is set within the temporal perspective offered by Tiresias’ encompassing consciousness, so that the mythical past is reduced to the level of sterile loveless and mechanical intercourse of this episode. It has been suggested that Eliot’s use of Frazer and Weston is extraneous to an understanding of the poem. Hugh Kenner, for instance, states that anyone who read only the first four parts of the poem would fail to note such an influence. It has also been argued that the mythical method served as a strategy for ordering not the modern world but Eliot’s own disordered inner world, for the central motif of the fertility rites was that of a way of passing through death into a new life. The poem was drafted during his rest at Margate and Lausanne “during the autumn of 1921 by a convalescent preoccupied partly with the ruin of post-war Europe, partly with his own health and the conditions of his servitude to a bank in London, partly with a hardly exorable apprehension that two thousand years of European continuity had for the first time run dry.” The modernist poet comes to write his poetry after his great tradition of poetry has been all but tapped out, he therefore as Eliot mentions in his ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ enters into a dialogue with tradition itself, which is effectively brought out in the poem through his use of myths and allusions. Although Eliot’s use of myth is often cryptic and ambiguous, and may seem extraneous, it does widen the range of the poem’s significance. By applying timeless myths to express the modern malady Eliot hints at the recurring pattern of devastation that hits human civilisation time and again and is not unique to 20th century Europe, it is only through decay and destruction that new modes of survival arises and humankind progresses.