Name: - Dave Mayuri p.
Std: - M.A.
English SEM: - 3
Paper no: - 9. The Modernist
Literature
Topic name: - Archetypal reading
o The Waste Land
Roll no: - 13
Submitted by: - Department of
English. M.K.B.U.
Introduction of The Waste Land:-
The waste land is a masterpiece long poem by T. S. Eliot. It
was widely regarded as “One of the most important poems of the 20th
century” and a central text in modernist poetry. Published in 1922, the 434
line. Poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of the
creation and 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
handful of dust,”
and the mantra in the Sanskrit
language “Shantih shantih shantih”.
Eliot
poem loosely follows the Holy Grail and The Fisher king combined with vignettes
of contempory British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural
allusions from the western canon, because of this, critics and scholars regard
the poem as obscure. The poem shifts between voices of satire and unannounced
changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring of a vast and dissonant
range of cultures and literature.
The poem’s structure is
dividing into five sections:-
1) The burial of the Death.
2) A game of chess.
3) The fire sermon.
4) Death by Water.
5) What the Thunder said.
Let’s start into the,
Archetypal
reading of The Waste Land:-
Let’s start into the point first of all introduced of
what is Archetypal criticism, let’s see,
What is
Archetypal criticism:-
In literary criticism the term
archetype denotes recurrent narrative design, patterns of action, character-types,
themes, and images which are identifiable in a wide variety of literature, as
well as in Myth, dreams and even social rituals.
Such recurrent items are
held to be the result of elemental and Universal forms or patterns in human psyche,
whose effective embodiment in a literary work evokes a profound response from
the attentive reader, because he or she shares the psychic archetypes expressed
by the author.
Bodkin’s Archetypal patterns
in poetry the first work on the subject of archetypal literary criticism,
applies Jung’s theories about the collective unconscious archetypes, and
primordial images to literature. Frye’s thesis in “The Archetypes of
literature” remains largely unchanged in Anatomy of criticism.
What are
the examples of Archetypes in literature:-
Archetypes fall into the two categories:
characters, situations/symbols. It is earliest to understand them with the help
of examples. Listed below are some of the most common archetypes in each category.
Characters
examples:-
1). The
hero – the
courageous figure, the one who’s always running in and
saving the day.
2). The
outcast – the outcast is just that. He or she has been cast out of
society or has left it on a voluntary basis. The outcast is figure can often
times also be considered as a Christ figure.
3).The star- crossed lovers- this is the young couple joined by
love but unexpectedly parted by fate.
Situation/
symbol examples:-
Archetypal symbol very
more than archetype narrative or character types, but any symbol with deep
roots in a culture’s mythology, such as the forbidden fruit in genesis as even
the poison apple in snow white is an example of symbol that resonates to
archetypal criticism.
1). The
Task:- a situation in which a character, or group of
characters, is driven to complete duty of monstrous proposition.
2).Water:- water is symbol of life,
cleansing, and rebirth. It is a strong life force and is often depicted as a
living reasoning force.
Water- birth- death- resurrection creation;
purification and redemption; fertility and growth
3) Sea/ ocean:- the
mother of all life; spiritual mystery; death and/ or rebirth; timelessness and
entirely.
4) Rivers: - death and rebirth; the flowing of time into eternity;
transitional phases of the life cache…
Example- Death by Water, polluted river in
Waste land.
5)Sun:- fire and sky closely related creative energy;
thinking, enlightenment, wisdom, spiritual vision.
Rising sun-
birth, creation, enlightenment
Setting sun-
death
Archetypal
reading of The Waste Land:-
At first glance, The Waste
Land appears fragmentary even incoherent. The themes of the cruelty of physical
existence and the poem’s difficult first part
1) “The
Burial of the Death,”
Give way to the simpler but no
less horrify portrayal of upper and lower class life in.
2) “A Game of chess”
The materialism and fearful
ennui of the one the abortions and physical decay of the other
And part 3 and part 4 are more
deeply and overtly ironic.
“In Fire sermon” the reader finds
neither the spiritual love that Buddha and Augustine advised nor the sexual
passion that they warned against but
only perfunctory sexual encounters
that leave the partners as separate and unfulfilled as they were before.
“Death by Water” Eliot turns the symbol
of physical and spiritual life into yet another from of death in age given over
to dying.
“What the Thunder said” is at
once the most pessimistic of the poem’s five sections. The fact that it ends
with the Hindu words and Sanskrit language “Santih” (the peace that passes understanding)
repeated three times may be constructed like the thunder heralding the needed,
life- bringing rain as a sign of recovery or as yet another of the may
fragments the Eliot and his narrator have shored against their not the readers
ruin, a ruin which grows more perspective, more total throughout the poem.
The ambiguity of the final section of Eliot’s
dense and difficult poem is appropriate in that Eliot wishes to leave the
reader not with moralistic solution but with a difficult and necessary choice;
either the spiritual life that the reader finds so conspicuous by its absence
or the spiritual death that Eliot chronicle so exhaustively. Composed as a
“Stream of consciousness by the blind and androgynous seer, “Tiresias”, of
Greek myth,
The waste land depicts a
secularized world in need of spiritual redemption. Eliot not only wishes to
describe The Waste land; he wants the reader to experiences it, to the absences
as well as the presence of some deeper level of meaning.
Waste
land Archetype:-
Gray, brown, black, Either way
too much water or way too little. Marked by antagonism, hatred, war, Nature is
destructive loss of innocence; scarcity of food, shelter love despite constant
toil. Our hero quest ultimately focuses on reaching his garden setting,
whatever that can be a physical or symbolic setting. We’re all trying to move
toward our own personal garden setting. Ironically, sometimes in our efforts to
create our garden we’re actually creating a Waste land.
-
Environmentally
Emotionally
Spiritually
Physically
Archetypal
themes:-
Hero – good overcoming evil
Obstacle- struggle with self, struggle
with nature
Quest – death and rebirth
Initiation- coming of age, loss of
innocence
Outcast- alienation, isolation of
archetypal
“The
Burial of the Dead”:-
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. the women
mixes a Mediation on the seasons with remarks on the barren state of her
current existence.
The Waste land opens with a reference to
Chaucer’s Canterbury tales. In this case, though, April is not the happy month
of pilgrimages and storytelling it is instead the time when he land should be
regenerating after a long winter.
Regeneration, though, is painful, for
it brings back reminders of a more fertile and happier past. In the modern
world, winter, the time of forgetfulness and humbleness, is indeed preferable.
The topic of memory particularly when it involves remembering the dead is of
critical importance in the waste land. Memory creates conformation of the past
with the present, juxtaposition That points out just how badly things
decayed.
Life in
death and Death in life:-
Life-death-Rebirth:-
Recurrent pattern runs through all Archetypal reading / myth:
winter (death), April showers (re -birth). Fertility myth; of fertility god
orisis the effigy stuck with grains buried in water- sprouting of grains signify rebirth. Christianity- crucify
(death) of Christian and resurrection (re-birth) to redeem humanity from
sin.
“Of hardly less
Important of readers, however, is knowledge of Eliot’s basic method. The waste
land is built on a major contact a device which is a favorite of Eliot’s and to
be found in many of his poems. The contract is between two kinds of life and
two kinds of death. Life devoid of meaning is death: sacrificial death may be
life giving, an awaking to life. The poem occupies itself to a great extent
with this paradox, variation upon it.
The fact that men have
lost knowledge of good and evil, keeps them from being alive, viewing the
modern Waste land as a realm in which the inhabitants do not even exit.
‘April is the cruelest
month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead
land, mixing
Memory and desire,
stirring
Dull roots with spring
rain
Winter kept us warm,
covering
Earth in forgetful snow,
feeding.
This is life
–in-death; similarly, death-in-life is exemplified as a life of complete
inactivity, listlessness and apathy. That is why winter welcome to them and
April is the cruelest of months, for it reminds them of the stirring of life
and, they dislike to be roused from their death-in-life.
“A Game
of Chess”:-
A game of chess is the
second part of our journey with sign part. “The game of chess”, Eliot depicts
the lovelessness in marriage in an age where sex is sterile the title ‘the game
of chess’ has been borrowed from Middleton’s women beware women it uphold the
fact that our indulgence in luxurious and materialistic world is akin to the
game of chess, which can blind us religious and moral obligations.
A suggest that sex has become a
Matter of moves and counter- moves and a source of memory pleasure, a sordid
game of seduction, and exploitation of innocent.
The sex- relation of is
meaningless routine, a mere mechanical relationship bringing them no
satisfaction the typist and clerk e text. Not only has sex been vulgarized and
commercialized there also prevailed abnormal sex-practice of various kinds. All
European is burning with lust and sexuality. Unreal city…Condon Bridge is
falling down. A social document of neurosis Bourdon, ennui, frustration,
disillusionment despair and hopelessness of the modern “Hollow Man” stuffed in
mind with straw.
“The
Fire Sermon”:-
The title, the longest
section of the waste land, is taken from a sermon given by ‘Buddha’ in which he
encourages his followers to give up earthly passion and seek freedom from
earthly things a turn away from the earthly does indeed take place in this
section, as a series of increasingly debased sexual encounter concludes with a
river song and religious incantation. The section then comes to an abrupt end
with a few lines from St. Augustine’s confession (“burning”).
Tiresias, in Greek mythology,
a seer, or prophet, from tables, said to have been trucked blind by the goddess
Athena because he had seen her bathing. Tiresias assumes many masks and his
voice of inmates of the modern waste land, and at times with ghostly voices
from the past….
The whole poem is Tiresia’s,
‘streams of consciousness and Tiresias, blind, and important spirituality
embittered, old and important, 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 visible moral values.
Oneness of characters 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.
“Death by Water”:-
The shortest of the poem
“Death by Water”, describes a man, plebes the Phoenician, who has died,
apparently by drawing. In death he has forgotten his Wordily cases as the
characters of the sea have picked his body apart. The narrator asks his body
apart. The narrator asks his reader to consider phelbas and a recall his or her
own morality.
“fear death by water” she
says, after pulling the card of the drowned sailor, Eliot further emphasize
phebals deride up antiquity and irreverence by placing this section in the
distant past.
“What the
Thunder Said”:-
Here also Eliot implies
path to regenerate the denizens of the Waste land. Eg. What the thunder said:
Datta-give; Dyathawam-sympathies; Damyata-self control.
Eliot bringing together the
wisdom of the east and west and show that spiritual regeneration can come, if
only we heed the voice of the Thunder
DA
Datta:- devote to noble cause
DA
Dayadhvam:-
sympathies with the sorrow and suffering of others
DA
Damyata:-
self-control over’s passion and desires.
Conclusion:-
Eliot’s
allusions to composers writer holy books, and so forth underscore the abiding
presence of this deeper level. More importantly, so, too does the poem’s
underlying plot, drawn from the legends of the fisher king and the Holy Grail.
The presence of this mythic subtext implies both the fallen, confused state of
the modern age and Eliot’s alternative to it.
Northrop frye, T. S. Eliot New York grove press 1963. An analysis of Eliot‘s work
primarily the critical perspective of myth excellent conclusion on the
archetypal aspect of The Waste Land.
