Assignment
Name: Trivedi Disha Hiteshbhai
Paper no: 9(modernist literature)
Topic: Thematic reading of the wasteland and
concept of Da.Da.Da.
Year: 2015-2017
M.A.Sem=3
Submitted to: Smt. S.b.gardi department of English m. k. Bhavnagar
University
Topic: Thematic reading of the wasteland and concept
of Da.Da.Da.
Ø Brief summary of the Wasteland:
The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot. It is widely
regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central
text in Modernist
poetry.[2][3] Published in 1922, the 434-line[B] poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial. It was published
in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruelest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust",
and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih".
Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs
many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. Because of this,
critics and scholars regard the poem as obscure. The poem shifts between voices of
satire and pfeaturing abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant range of cultures and literature.
The poem's structure is divided into five sections. The first section, The Burial of the Dead,
introduces the diverse themes of disillusionment and despair. The second, A Game of Chess, employs vignettes
of several characters—alternating narrations—that address those themes experiential. The Fire
Sermon, the third section, offers a philosophical meditation in relation to
the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of
Hippo and eastern
religions. After a fourth section that includes a brief lyrical petition, the
culminating fifth section, What
the Thunder Said, concludes with an image of judgment.
Ø The Wasteland poem divided into five parts:
1. The burial of the dead
2. Game of the chess
3. The fire sermon
4. Death by water
5. What the thunder said
Ø Use of myths in the wastland:
Jessie Weston’s from ritual to romance:
myth/legend of holy grail (with spear) and fisher king the grail and story is the
restoration of a fisher king and thereby of the fertility of a wastland, the
lance and the grail itself being phallic symbols.
James Frazier'sthe golden bough: myth of vegetation- birth-death-rebirth
·
The sick fisher
king, his impotency and his waste & barren land symbolizes, the sick soul
and the desolation of his material life.
·
In the legends
which she treats in this book, a land has been blighted by a curse. The crops
do not grow and the animals cannot reproduce. The plight of the land is
connected with the plight of the lord of the land fisher king.
·
The cruse can be
removed only by the appearance of a knight who will ask the meaning of the
various symbols which are displayed to him in the castle. The shift in meaning
from physical to spiritual sterility is easily made, and was as a matter of
fact made in certain of the legends. As Eliot has pointed out, knowledge of
this symbolism is essential for an understanding of the poem.
Ø Myth of tiresias:
King Oedipus of Thebes, his blindness
and gift of prophesy- life of man and woman.
Ø Biblical myth:
Wasteland of Emmaus mentioned in ecclesiasts
and Ezekiel (Old Testament).
T.S.Eliot has used a number of devises
to impart of unity to this poem
1.
Tiresias as a unifying link:
a)
Tiresias- a mythical
character:
tiresias, in Greek mythology, a seer, or prophet,
from Thebes, said to have been struck blind by the goddess Athena because he
had seen her bathing. Athena compensated tiresias with the gift of prophecy.
According to another version, after separating a pair of snakes that he found
copulating in the road, tiresias was for a time transformed into a woman.
Later, having become a man again, he was asked by Zeus and Hera, king and queen
of gods, to tell which sex had a more pleasure in love. When he replied that
woman had nine times as much pleasure as man, Hera in anger, blinded him, but
Zeus granted him long life. Tiresias played a prominent part in theben legends,
delivering prophecies to Oedipus, king of Thebes.
b)
Importance of tiresias: he is connecting link between past and present. He is
bi-sexual, he has had most varied experience and so he symbolizes human
consciousness, the knowledge and experience acquired by the race through the
ages. He is a prophet and detached spectator who frequently comments on the
human panorama that passes before his eye. He is also a fellow sufferer in the agonized drama of human life. He has the voice of senility the conscious
humanity. Deploring its spiritual degeneration in the modern world. It is he
who exposes by his comments the spiritual acuity the triviality, the monotony,
the aimlessness of contemporary civilization it’s seek hurry and divided aims. He
is unifying symbols, without whom the poem would be a phantasmagoria, a
nightmare, a series of disconnected scenes and meaningless talks, incoherent
and confused. Tiresias assumes many masks and his voice alternates with the
voice of the inmates of the modern waste land, and at time with the ghostly
voices from the past.
c)
Tiresias blind
and spiritually embittered, old and impotent, who is the protagonist of the
poem in the waste land , wandering about in great quest, stands for modern man
in quest of true spiritual light and viable moral values.
d)
He is spectator
and reporter of the happenings....
e)
What he sees is
the substance of the poem.
f)
He had the
burning experience of the fire of lust both as a man and woman, so he was the
fittest person to comment on the same.
g)
The whole poem is
Tiresias’s stream of consciousness.
2) Oneness of character and experience:
Not only does tiresias melt into the
other character of the poem, but the melting of the characters, into each other
is of course, as aspect of the general process. Thus Elizabeth, the hyacinth
girl and three themes nymphs, melt into each other. The effect created is a sense
if oneness of experience, and of the unity of all periods.
The same effect is created in the
experience of the typist and the clerk or Mr.Eugenidezs. Similarly, the
similarity of experience of the three waste lands with that of modern
post-world war waste land also creates effect of the oneness of experience.
3) The mythical method:
The mythical method consists in seeking
analogies for the present in the past.
Ø The advantages:
a)
It provides a
pattern, a way of controlling and ordering and giving shape to what is shapeless
and chaotic.
b)
It provides a
norm for measuring the extent of degeneracy in contemporary Europe.
c)
It shows that the
present spiritual predicament is an ever-recurring phenomenon and so a
universal significance is imparted to it.
d)
Myths form the
part of collective consciousness. It helps poet in communicating his meaning
with minimal explanation.
Refer
to theme of sexual perversion and use of myth- three waste lands as objective
correlatives to express poet’s emotion for the current waste land is Europe
after world war.
Ø Theme of life – death- rebirth:
Recurrent pattern runs though all myth:
winter (death), April showers (rebirth). Fertility myth: harvest (death), rain
(life). Myth of fertility god orisis the effigy stuck with grains- buried in
water- spouting of grains signify rebirth. Christianity- crucify (death) of
Christ and resurrection (rebirth) to
redeem humanity from sin.
4) The sequence of pictures- modern technique of
cinematography:
a)
As in cinema-film
there are a series of shots transcending time and place, meaningless if
considered separately, but taken together forming a coherent whole.
b)
It helps in
controlling time and space gives universal and permanent significance.
c)
Successive
clippings, after a few reading fix themselves in memory and convey a coherent
whole of meaning.
d)
This sequence of
picture is central to the poem. The interpretations of these pictures and the
other images and symbols may vary from person to person. Yet, what is definite
is the vitality and realism of these pictures as they pass by like shots in a
film.
5) Continuity of time: the development in modern psychology has changed the
concept of time- the past, the present and the future are viewed as a
continuing whole. Hence poet moves freely from the present to the past and to
the future.
6) The structure:
The structure is that of spiral up and
down. The poem proceeds with deeper and deeper probing into the modern malaise.
Throughout the poem we come back to the same point, but at different levels.
I.A.RICHARDS: music of ideas. This symphony of ideas move in spiral ups and
downs to reach at the zenith in what
the thunder said.
Ø Concept of DA..DA..DA.. In a brief:
The wasteland contains several allusion-
literary, religious, and mythical, etc. In Wasteland we find many lines which
is referred to Indian history or religion. In last line of poem there we find
he has concluded his poem with very famous ‘Sanskrit’ words “shantih shantih shantih”.
For us this words shantih makes us very religious power. This word also consuls
with ‘Sanskrit Upanishads’. Eliot uses the three ‘DA’ which is taken from “brihadaranyaka
Upanishads”. Means...
ü *Datta... be
giver
We have to be giver. For sake of
humanity, lots of people scarified their life also because only bloods purify
the evils. Humanity is survived only because of such people. So, it is said
that
“Blood
is thicker than water”
ü *Dayadhavam... sympathies
Everybody in his prison because of self
ego. And self is the key to come out from it but really it is very difficult
task.
ü *Damyata... self control
Everything is burning in wastland. Boat as
body and finding and fished, through this we find that western culture has bad
connection with sexual perversion and spiritual drought. So, self control is
the most important thing in life.
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setting_(narrative)
