Download Myths in “The Waste Land”

IJCAES Special Issue on
Basic, Applied & Social Sciences, Volume II, October 2012
[ISSN: 2231-4946]
Myths in “The Waste Land”
Dipsikha Bhagawati
Research Scholar, Singhania University
Abstract— Eliot has clarified the concept of mythical method in his review of James Joyce's 'Ulyses'.
He writes:' In using myth,in manipulating a futility and anarchy which is contemporary
history...continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,Mr.Joyce is pursuing a method
which others must pursue after him...It 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....Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.'Eliot has adopted the
technique of compression and telescoping and with a poetic shorthand. He links the predicament of
modern humanity with that of other ages of human history, turning the contemporary malaise into an
eternal problem of man.thus the past and the present merge together and antiquity is brought into the
embrace of contemporaneity, so that a poem of four hundred thirty lines acquires a disillusionment in
the cultural history of the entire human nation.
Keywords— Myth, Eliot,The Waste Land,Disillusionment,Futility,Anarchy.
I.
INTRODUCTION
In his essay “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca”,Eliot observes : “The great poet in writing himself writes his
time ”. The dictum is a fair statement of his own position in relation to the poetry of his age.But it will be biased to
think that the whole carrer of Eliot was a tacit endorsement of the general political trend of his age.In fact , he
advances with the popular poetic tide only till the end of the secular phase of his carrer.His poetry reflects the
fragmentation of a war ridden ,claustrophobic world.
II.
USE OF MYTH IN 'THE WASTE LAND'
T.S.Eliot's “The Waste Land” is the most sustained and complex use of the mythical method.Taking as its
underlying pattern the great myth as interpreted by Jessie Weston,Sir James Frazer,and others, and weaving the
theme of barrenness,decay and death, and the quest for life and ressurection which he found in these anthropological
sources with the Christian story and with Buddhist and other oriental analogies,and incorporating into the poem
both examples and symbols of the failure of modern civilization ,moral squalor and social vaccuam - which are in
turn mythically and symbolically related to the anthropological and religious themes,Eliot endeavoured to project a
complete view of civilization , of human history and human failure and of perennial quest for salvation . That the
modern poet concerned with the complexities of his civilization can no longer count on any common body of
knowledge in the light of which he can confidently use myth and symbol, is forced by the condition of his time to
create or re-create his own myths and to draw on his own perhaps highly unusual reading for reference and allusion
is a commonplace.It is the comprehensive aim of “The Waste Land”to make necessary dependence on a synthetic
myth.
In a review of James Joyce's Ulysses in 'The Dial ' , November , 1923 , Eliot wrote -'' I hold this book to be the
most important expression which the present age has found . ...In using myth , in manipulating a continuous parallel
between contemporaneity and antiquity , Mr . Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him ... it is
simply a way of controlling , of ordering , of giving a shape and a significance to the immense penorama of futility
and anarchy which is contemporary history ... instead of narrative method , we may now use the mythical method ''.
The mythical method of Eliot, however, is different that of Joyce in Ulysses.Joyce follows the technic of
elaboration and expansion, but Eliot has adapted the technic of compression and telescoping, with a poetic shorthand. He has frankly acknowledged his debt to Jessie Weston's “From Ritual to Romance” and Frazer's “The
Golden Bough”, specially the portion dealing with the fertility rituals.Frazer's work was significant for Eliot because
it demonstrates the continuity between the primitive and the civilized and revealed the substratum of savagery and
violence beneath the surface of civilization.When in 1921,Eliot saw a performance of Igor Stravinsky”s Le Sacre du
Printemps,in which the ballet was based upon vegetation rites,he missed 'the sense of present' in everything except
in the music.In his music there was a continuity between the the primitive past and the civilized present which was
later on reflection in “The Waste Land”too(That corpse you planted last yearin your garden) and the barbaric cries
of modern life are heard in the 'sound of horns and motors which shall bring /Sweeny to Mrs porterin the spring.
Eliot has used both Pagan and Christian myths. From Egypt, he borrowed of the fertility ritual myth. The effigy
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Dipsikha Bhagawati
of the God of vegetation stocked with grainsas his body was burried underground. When the grains sprouted it was
said that God was re-born. The Christian myth is about sinfulness of man and suffering of Christ in atonment of
man's sin and resurrection. In this context Matthiessen says-''There is a basic resemblance between the vegetation
myths of the rebirth of the potency of man ,Christian story of the resurrection and the grail legend of purification”.In
his notes to The Waste Land, Eliot wrote that he associated the Hanged God of Frazer with the hooded figure of the
resurrected Christ in part v of the poem.
This rhythm of nature was enacted in the 'agon' or the conflict between the old priest and the young successor
which ended with the death of the old and the triumph of the new. This happen in ''the bloody woods which Eliot
has alluded to in his' Sweeny Among the Nightingales'
Apart from the central motive running through all the nature myths, there is another theme in a great many
myths which is by no means inferior. The theme relates to the close connection between sex and religion; the
regulagion and sanctification of sex bound up with the health and vitality of the spritual life, and its degeneration
and perversion being a symptom of spiritual decline.For example, the love of Queen Elizabeth and Earl of Leicester
is not different from the sexual affair between the typist girl and the male clerk.Eliot's London is not different from
Baudlaire's Paris and Dante's Limbo. The idea is that the promblems are homogenous inspite of distance in time and
space. This theory of Eliot is elaborated in his controversial essay on Shakespeare's 'Hamlet'.According to this
theory the best way of expressing a personal emotion artistically is to invent or discover a story or a set of incidents,
situation and characters which may become the fit medium for the emotion. This personal emotion of his sensitive
heart is expressed through the mythical story of the Fisher King that he found in Weston's 'From Ritual to Romance'.
The Fisher King who was the region's Lord, has been robbed of his power to procreate; he is rendered impotent
either through physical sickness or maiming. This curse could only be removed by a questioning Knight who asks
the meaning of various symbols which are presented to him in the course of his visit to a castle. In the original
legend,the sterility is primarily physical,whereas in Eliot's poem, it is primarily spritual. In order to give a universal
and timeless dimension to the modern waste land, the poet has subsumed under the principal myth of the Fisher
King,three other legends with classical,biblical and Indian associations.The classical legend of King Oedipus of
Thebes is the legend of a man who killed his father and married his own mother.This legend enters the poem
through the protagonist-Tiresias.The story of Oedipus is also a story of sin,beginning about spiritual regeneration
and rebirth. Lastly in the final movement,there is an explicit reference to the spiritual waste land in ancient
India,when 'Ganga was sunken low' and Prajapati speaking to the suppliants,man,demon and God in thunder
prescribed 'Dutta'(to give),Dayadhvam(to sympathise) and Damayat(to control) as the three fold path of deliverance
from the present impasse.
III.
CONCLUSION
Thus Eliot has interwined many mythical strands in order to form a complex traditional background to explain
the nature and measure the depth of the spiritual waste land which is 'contemporary history'.The whole process of
this cross-interaction breathes the spirit of Walt Whitman's experience in 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'-the continuity
between fragments of a vanishing mind and our own mind.Conrad Aiken recalls that Eliot always had with him his
pocket edition of Dante in the winter of 1921-1922 ('An Anatomy of Melancholy', in T.S.Eliot:The Waste Land:A
Casebook ed.C.B.Cox and Arnold P.Hinchliffe [London :Macmillan, 1968, rpt, 1975]).Frazer made 'myth' an art and
Eliot established himself to be the most artistic craftsman to use this .
REFERENCES
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Brand Blanshand ---'' Eliot in Memory '' ( Yale Review . June 1965 )
B.Rajan---'' T.S.Eliot:A Study of his Writings, by several hands'' (London:Dennis Dobson.1947)
David Trotter---"Modernism and Empire: Reading The Waste Land"(Critical Quarterly,Sprit Summer,1986
Dr . S.Sen- ''T.S.Eliot : The Waste Land Other Poems (Unique Publishers ,2010 )
James Olney - ''Essays From the Southern Review '' (Oxford , Clarendon , 1988 )
Lyndall Gordon - ''T .S.Eliot : An Imperfect Life '' (Newyork :W.W.Norton and Company ,2000)
Manju Jain - '' T.S.Eliot : Selected Poems '' (Oxford University Press , 1992 )
T.S.Eliot -'' The Frontiers of Criticism '' in '' On Poetry and Poets ''(Newyork : Noonday Press , 1961 )
T.S. Eliot - '' The Frontiers of Criticism '' in '' On Poetry and Poets '' (London : Faber and Faber Ltd , 1986 )
T.S.Eliot - ''The Waste Land : A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts including the Annotations of Ezra Pound '' edited with
an introduction by Valerie Eliot . (Harcourt and Company ,1971)
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