THE WASTE LAND
Summarised, paraphrased or quoted from Penguin Critical Studies series: Stephen Coote, T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land
The Waste Land pictures a devastated land, with a sense of collapse and fatigue, the distraction of an entire civilization, a feeling of universal ruin.
The poems concerns … capture the moral, sexual and spiritual decay – the sterility and deep intellectual uncertainty.
The Waste Land is a study of a civilization doomed by its own sterility. A chorus of voices, now individual, now subsumed in the blind and thwarted Tiresias, express wretchedness in their own or borrowed words. Round them the jagged memories of shattered past remind them of what they have lost: potency of sexual and spiritual coherence. Precisely because they know only lust, neurosis or ‘a heap of broken images,’ and because no one in the poem can patch these together, we should not expect Phlebas and the Fisher King, Adonis and Mr. Equitone, to line up in a regular pattern, an order we can neatly explicate. Like figures in a nightmare, they are sometimes clearly themselves, at other times they merge into each other as tantalizing compound ghosts.
Eliot’s method is to juxtapose fragmented glimpses of the present … with memories of the past: the positive remains of myth, religion and poetry which suggest either ways of coherent life or sterility of the modern world which has devalued them.
The Epigraph is from Satyricon of Petronius suggests the infinite world-weariness, blindness and absence of redeeming joy which characterizes The Waste Land.
‘The Burial of the Dead’ – the title taken from the Anglican funeral rite suggests the forgetting of an anguished personal failure in love and the death of a once potent culture of myth in which mankind used to live. The survivor is the disinherited man whose barren, fruitless existence will be the poem’s chief concern. The third theme is the death of the divine but mortal lover of the Earth-Mother, or goddess of fertility, her subsequent withdrawal to the underworld and the period of agonized waiting while the spring and the consequent resurrection of the spirit. Such an event will not take place in the modern world. Though spring will come, it will bring no joy, no rejuvenated soul. The myths have lost their magic and sustaining power. Man will be roused to the bleakness of his existence. Instead of hope, there is only continuous spiritual blight over the land, a blight at once physical and metaphysical which corresponds exactly to the that inflicted on his land by the maimed Fisher King of Arthurian legend who (according to Eliot) was analogous to the gods of the older fertility rites. Just as the Fisher King’s sexual maiming reduced his kingdom to a Waste Land, so the emotional maiming of the modern man inflicts the suffering and death on his world that is recorded in Eliot’s poem.
Opening fragment suggests modern man’s love of death and his reluctant participation in the rites of spring – reference to the opening of Chaucer’s General Prologue: revivifying power of spring is too painful for the moment.
1st episode – memory of pre-war Germany: delight of childhood and the racist nationalism
2nd episode – the deserts of the Old Testament – a time without redeemer and symbolic water; the people have turned their backs on God, and infertility and destruction are the punishments for such spiritual blindness; they know only ‘a heap of broken images’ – it corresponds to the form of the Waste Land
3rd episode – Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde and modern love affair are juxtaposed – modern love and sensuality have no power to redeem
Madame Sosostris episode – bankruptcy of modern life and an attempt at seeking spiritual enlightenment; contains some of the leading images: drowning, the Hanged God, the traditions of fertility cults analysed by Frazer (The Golden Bough) and Weston (From Ritual to Romance)
London commuters – actual people and spiritually dead or blinded souls of Dante’s Inferno: London is all cities like all war is one war
‘A Game of Chess’ – highlights the sexual and emotional aspects of spiritual collapse of modern man; sex and emotion have become a form of anguish
Eliot gives a picture of the modern world of sex: among the wealthy and cultures it has become debased and neurotic, among the lower classes it is a matter of abortions and promiscuity. Nowhere … is there a life-enhancing sense of joy, an access to the sources of healthy psychic activity. Nowhere is there a sense of redemption or potency. All I sterile – a Waste Land.
‘The Fire Sermon’ – the decay and destruction of the landscape in which the Narrator (absorbed into the figures of Tiresias and the Fisher King) is left alone while, through his head, passes a kaleidoscopic range of references to the past: to Renaissance poetry, death, drowning, Grail myth and sex. The last is sterile and meaningless. As these images pass, there follow others of London , its glory and decay. None of them is coherent. The nadir of sterility is reached here and the violent juxtaposition of St. Augustine an Buddha, the ‘two representatives of eastern and western asceticism.’ Some form of religious vision, an affirmation of faith beyond the harrowing detail of every day, is called for.
Fire is a symbol of desire: desire not just for sex , but for any form of attachment to worldly things. Such burning with needs binds man for ever to the wheel of cause and effect and hence forbids him any means of liberation or happiness.
Desire does not lead to happiness or fulfillment, but to the wretchedness of modern lust, the discovery of the corrupt city of man that St. Augustine made in his early youth (Confessions). The ‘unholy loves of Carthage’ are painful and untrue since they are not directed to God. St. Augustine’s vision is of the inner burning desert of the soul, lusting but sterile. Man is aflame with desire, but such desire leads only to the discovery of psychological and spiritual death.
‘Death by Water’ – Madame Sosostris said ‘to fear death by water’. The warning symbolizes contemporary spiritual blindness since, in the ancient cults, this form of death was a prelude to resurrection and the renewal of the fertility of the land –the myths are no longer potent.
‘What the Thunder Said’ – reference to moral guidance offered by the Hindu Brihadaranyaka Upanishad; a vision of freedom beyond the constraints of desire and one which is connected to ideas of rain and fertility. The suggestion is in this Hindu gospel is that through ‘right action’ – giving, sympathy and self-control – man may indeed go beyond his sterile world and hence revive the potency of the universe in which he lives.
Slaughtered god and the period of mourning and infertility prior to his resurrection (Christ in Gethsemane and the trial before Pilate vs. the images of spiritual death )
And even if the God has risen, man cannot recognize him (the appearance of Christ to his disciples on the road to Emmaus)
Fear of revolution in contemporary Europe
The approach to the Chapel Perilous of the Grail story—the chapel is empty but the thunder is heard - the voice of God and his command to “give, sympathize, control’ – to free themselves from the selfish desire
Giving= the giving of self in love
Sympathy = the giving of oneself to many others in charity
Control = the feeling of order from rightly conceived unity with one’s beloved and the elements
What the thunder urges on man is love, the free surrendering of self and the consequent spiritual and psychological health of the private and universal Waste Land redeemed. But such loss of self can be neither complete nor permanent. The best Mankind can hope for is remembered glimpse of what has been or could have been experienced, and the Narrator is forced to recall his isolation.
The Narrator is the Fisher King – the psychologically wounded man. No permanent salvation has been achieved. There is no guarantee of cultural continuance.
There remains only the partial glimpse, the divine instruction to give, sympathize and control. Only in love and in loss of selfhood – however brief it can be—can modern man , isolated among the ruin of his culture, threatened by enemies, within and without, his myths broken and emotions wrecked, glimpse for a moment the possibility of ‘the Peace which passeth understanding.’