Sunday, 1 November 2015

Paper - 9 Archetypal reading of The Waste Land


                    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.

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      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.

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