1. T.S. Eliot The Waste Land (1)
LIT 3023 Modernism
T.S. Eliot
The Waste Land (1)

2. Overview
Structure
Themes
Technique

3. Eliot Reads

4. Structure Five part structure – recalls Aristotle’s unities
But structure heavily altered by Pound – e.g. Death by Water reduced by 90%
So…?

5. One approach to structure
I. The Burial of the Dead (asking the question; starting the journey; crossing the threshold)
II. A Game of Chess (the first incomplete, unsatisfactory answer: sex without love in marriage; the road of trials)
III. The Fire Sermon (a second unsatisfactory answer: sex without love outside marriage; various temptations)
IV. Death by Water (the nadir, sparagmos, symbolic death)
V. What the Thunder Said (the final hopeful, or at least on-going answer; reconciliation with parental figures, the return )
Elisa Kay Sparks
Source:
Sparagmos: Sparagmos (Ancient Greek: σπαραγμός) refers to an ancient Dionysian ritual in which a living animal, or sometimes even a human being, would be sacrificed by being dismembered, by the tearing apart of limbs from the body. Sparagmos was frequently followed by omophagia (the eating of the raw flesh of the one dismembered). It is associated with the Maenads or Bacchantes, followers of Dionysus, and the Dionysian Mysteries.

6. …or more simply
I Earth
II Air
III Fire
IV Water
V All elements

7. More structure Not linear Spatial Unified by symbol, not narrative
Works on allusions and echoes
Mosaic
Cinematic

8. Themes
“Thus the old magical theory of the seasons was displaced, or rather supplemented, by a religious theory. For although men now attributed the annual cycle of change primarily to corresponding changes in their deities, they still thought that by performing certain magical rites they could aid the god, who was the principle of life, in his struggle with the opposing principle of death.”
Frazer, The Golden Bough [abridged version] (London: Macmillan, 1922) p.324

9. Themes The quest or journey – Grail legend
Jessie Weston identified three stages of development in the medieval Grail romances. In the first of them, the hero was Gawain and the land had been wasted as a consequence of the mysterious death of an unnamed knight.
“This wasting of the land is found in three Gawain Grail stories…Thus, briefly, the object of the Rites is the restoration of Vegetation, connected with the revival of the god; the object of the Quest is the same, but connected with the restoration to health of the King.”
(The Grail and the Rites of Adonis)
Source: The Grail and the Rites of Adonis by J L Weston in Sources of the Grail, edited by John Matthews (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 1996) p.438

10. Fisher King
Jessie Weston: the Fisher King is derived from pagan fertility rituals, and beneath the surface of the numerous legends can be discerned the rites of primitive cults.
Heinzel: the Fisher King can be reduced, instead, to his archetypal status as the keeper of the Holy Grail, a position which entrenches him firmly within the iconography of esoteric Christianity.
(Heinzel: Die Alt-Französische Gral Romanen 1891).
Source- paraphrased at

11. Themes
Loomis:
…there were not only two main themes which tended to combine in bewildering associations, but several subordinate disharmonies contributed to the mystification of both the authors and their readers. There was a wounded King for the hero to cure; there was a slain King for him to avenge. Yet they seemed to bear somewhat the same name. The King's infirmity or death caused his land to be sterile and waste; yet, strange to say, he possessed a talisman of inexhaustible abundance.
R.S.Loomis, The Grail: from Celtic Myth to Christian Symbol (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991) p.95

12. How does this fit 1922? Post war Personal crisis for Eliot
Sense of impending catastrophe
Destruction of “old” civilisation
Debasement of personal relationships
Crisis of faith

13. Technique
Collage – deliberate juxtaposition of precursor texts and images
Effect – contrast past and present; urban vs. pastoral; idyllic past vs sordid present
E.g. opening of The Fire Sermon

14. Technique Fragmentation – of text, of syntax, of meaning. Why?
E.g. final section of poem – Babel?
Quotation – submerged, mangled, defamiliarised… Why?
E.g. “April is the cruellest month…”
“But at my back I always hear…”

15. Technique Still traditional elements though: Opening passage
Sonnet in the typist scene
Unreal City

16. Conclusion Very complex account of spiritual and moral decay
Sense of nostalgic longing for lost golden age
Self –disgust, self-pity
Breakdown, figured in the language.