The first section of The Waste Land takes its title from a line in the Anglican burial service. It is made up of four vignettes, each seemingly from the perspective of a different speaker. The first is an autobiographical snippet from the childhood of an aristocratic woman, in which she recalls sledding and claims that she is German, not Russian (this would be important if the woman is meant to be a member of the recently defeated Austrian imperial family). The woman mixes a meditation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her current existence (I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter). The second section is a prophetic, apocalyptic invitation to journey into a desert waste, where the speaker will show the reader something different from either / Your shadow at morning striding behind you / Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; / [He] will show you fear in a handful of dust. The almost threatening prophetic tone is mixed with childhood reminiscences about a hyacinth girl and a nihilistic epiphany the speaker has after an encounter with her. These recollections are filtered through quotations from Wagners operatic version of Tristan und Isolde, an Arthurian tale of adultery and loss. The third episode in this section describes an imaginative tarot reading, in which some of the cards Eliot includes in the reading are not part of an actual tarot deck. The final episode of the section is the most surreal. The speaker walks through a London populated by ghosts of the dead. He confronts a figure with whom he once fought in a battle that seems to conflate the clashes of World War I with the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage (both futile and excessively destructive wars). The speaker asks the ghostly figure, Stetson, about the fate of a corpse planted in his garden. The episode concludes with a famous line from the preface to Baudelaires Fleurs du Mal this was an important collection of Symbolist poetry, accusing the reader of sharing in the poets sins.
The four speakers in this section are frantic in their need to speak, to find an audience, but they find themselves surrounded by dead people and thwarted by outside circumstances, like wars. Because the sections are so short and the situations so confusing, the effect is not one of an overwhelming impression of a single character; instead, the reader is left with the feeling of being trapped in a crowd, unable to find a familiar face.
Not only is The Waste Land Eliots greatest work, but it may be, along with Joyces Ulysses, the greatest work of all modernist literature. A long work divided into five sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Eliot considered modern culture to constitute, particularly after the First World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of the pessimism with which Eliot approaches his subject is the poems epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl (a woman with prophetic powers who ages but never dies) looks at the future and proclaims that she only wants to die. The Sibyls predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its former glory. Thus, the underlying plot of The Waste Land, revolves around Eliots reading on the persistence of ancient fertility rituals in modern thought and religion; something which particularly interested him was the story of the Fisher King, who has been wounded in the genitals and whose lack of potency is the cause of his country becoming a desiccated waste land. Heal the Fisher King, the legend says, and the land will regain its fertility. According to Weston and Frazier, healing the Fisher King has been the subject of mythic tales from ancient Egypt to Arthurian England. Eliot picks up on the figure of the Fisher King legends wasteland as an appropriate description of the state of modern society. The important difference, of course, is that in Eliots world there is no way to heal the Fisher King; perhaps there is no Fisher King at all. The legends imperfect integration into a modern meditation highlights the lack of a unifying narrative in the modern world.
Eliots poem, like the texts that inspired it, draws on a vast range of sources. Eliot provided copious footnotes with the publication of The Waste Land in book form; these are an excellent source for tracking down the origins of a reference. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poems writing Eliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity. While Eliot employs a deliberately difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just frustrate his reader.He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in the confusing world of the twentieth century.
The Waste Land opens with a reference to Chaucers Canterbury Tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month of pilgrimages and storytelling. It is instead the time when the land should be regenerating after a long winter. Regeneration, is painful, for it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and numbness, is indeed preferable. Maries childhood recollections are also painful: the simple world of cousins, sledding, and coffee in the park has been replaced by a complex set of emotional and political consequences resulting from the war. The topic of memory, particularly when it involves remembering the dead, is of critical importance in The Waste Land. Memory creates a confrontation of the past with the present, a juxtaposition that points out just how badly things have decayed. Marie reads for most of the night: ostracized by politics, she is unable to do much else. To read is also to remember a better past, which could produce a coherent literary culture. The second episode contains a troubled religious proposition. The speaker describes a true wasteland of stony rubbish; in it, he says, man can recognize only [a] heap of broken images. Yet the scene seems to offer salvation: shade and a vision of something new and different. The vision consists only of nothingness which is so profound as to be frightening; yet truth also resides here: No longer a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by a mere void. The speaker remembers a female figure from his past, who he has apparently had some sort of romantic involvement. In contrast to the present setting in the desert, his memories are lush, full of water and blooming flowers. The vibrancy of the earlier scene, though, leads the speaker to a revelation of the nothingness he now offers to show the reader. Again memory serves to contrast the past with the present, but here it also serves to explode the idea of coherence in either place. In the episode from the past, the nothingness is more clearly a sexual failure, a moment of impotence.
Despite the overall joy of the moment, no reconciliation, and, therefore, no action, is possible. This in turn leads directly to the desert waste of the present. In the final line of the episode attention turns from the desert to the sea. Here, the sea is not a locus for the fear of nothingness, and neither is it the locus for a philosophical interpretation of nothingness; rather, it is the site of true, essential nothingness itself.
The third episode explores Eliots fascination with transformation. The tarot reader Madame Sosostris conducts the most outrageous form of reading possible, transforming a series of vague symbols into predictions, many of which will come true in succeeding sections of the poem. Eliot transforms the traditional tarot pack to serve his purposes. The drowned sailor makes reference to the ultimate work of magic and transformation in English literature, Shakespeares The Tempest; Those are pearls that were his eyes is a quote from one of Ariels songs. Transformation in The Tempest is the result of the highest art of humankind. Here, transformation is associated with vulgarity, and cheap mysticism. That Madame Sosostris will prove to be right in her predictions of death and transformation is a direct commentary on the failed religious mysticism and prophecy of the preceding desert section.
The final episode of the first section allows Eliot finally to establish the true wasteland of the poem, the modern city. The city is desolate and depopulated, inhabited only by ghosts from the past. Stetson, the apparition the speaker recognizes, is a fallen war comrade. The speaker pesters him with a series of questions about a corpse buried in his garden with the garden, we return to the theme of regeneration and fertility. This encounter can be read as a quest for a meaning behind the tremendous slaughter of the First World War; however, it can also be read as an exercise in ultimate futility as we see in Stetsons failure to respond to the speakers inquiries, the dead offer few answers. The great respective weights of history, tradition, and the poets dead predecessors combine to create an oppressive burden.
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