Paper 9,Modernist Literature

Name: Joshi Deepti M           

 Sem: 3              

Paper: Modernist Literature

Topic: Spiritual Degradation in ‘The wasteland’        

Submitted to:

      Smt.S.B Gardi

     Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji

     Bhavanagar University, Bhavanagar

    Gujarat (India)

     

                                  Spiritual Degradation in the Wasteland

 

Introduction:- 

T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is one of the most outstanding poems of the 20^th century. It has been hailed as Eliot’s masterpiece – the supreme triumph of the poetic art in modern times. The Wasteland is a poem about spiritual dryness, about the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance and value to men’s daily activities, sex brings no fruitfulness, and death heralds no resurrection.

Eliot had published his poem in 1922 and it was a time or age of disillusionment and decay for the people and this situation inspired him to write The Wasteland. As people had gone through the trauma of two world wars, they lost the faith in god and spirituality and the land of Europe became a waste land – a morally and spiritually barren land. Both world wars had inflected people’s physical as well as psychological wounds and world was in chaos. 

As affected by these wars, T.S. Eliot has expressed what he felt about his land in The Wasteland and how people gradually lost faith in god and spiritual decay is the main theme of the poem as because of it only his land is waste land.

For his poem The Wasteland, Eliot had been reading the book by Miss Weston From Rituals to Romance, and it influenced him even. He read The Wasteland of King Fisher whose kingdom had been laid waste by his own sexual sins and of his soldiers. It suggested him the title for his poem, as for him at that time Europe appeared to be a spiritual wasteland, laid waste by the sexual sins of the modern man.

In modern society there is decay and spiritual degeneracy whenever the sexual function is perverted. When the sexual act is separated from procreation there is spiritual degeneracy. In the modern society, there is perversion of sex and hence its degeneracy. Sex has been separated from love, marriage and procreation; it’s become more animal-copulation. 

For his poem Eliot has found the analogy of the ‘objective-corelative’ for the modern wasteland in three other wastelands. 

A.   The medieval wasteland of the Fisher King, a myth which is closely related with the grail legend. In this wasteland soldiers of King Fisher ravished the nuns of the chapels. Perilous said to contain the Holy Grail. And because of that King became impotent and his land suffered from famine. 

B.   The wasteland of Oedipus, King of Thebes in ancient Greece. In this land of Oedipus, Oedipus had sex with his mother and his country suffered, but later on through his penance the country became prosperous. 

C.   The Biblical evil land of Emmaus:- The biblical wasteland has been mentioned in the Old Testament. The land and the people suffered because the people worshipped idols. Prophet Ezekiel warned them to give up idolatry. The decay and desolation of the Biblical wasteland is mentioned by Eliot in his poem also.

Eliot’s wasteland resembles these three myths to show that how in modern wasteland even this kind of sin is committed by the people, and how people have lost faith in spirituality. But this land differs from them in as much as there are no signs yet of salvation or redemption from it. They have lost all faith in moral and religious values. Their life is an aimless wandering without any fixed goal. There is a perversion of values all around. And it can be seen in the ‘heaps of broken images’, water has merely become destructive, and is no longer a source of purification. In this world, modern man has become intellectually, mentally, physically, and emotionally impotent. For that Stephen Spender writes,

“The central theme of The Wasteland is the breakdown of civilization and the conditioning of those who live within it by that breakdown, so that every situation is a symptom of the collapse of values.”

A very first part of the poem ‘The Burial of the Dead’ develops the idea of the attractiveness of death or the difficulty rousing oneself from the death in life in which people of the wasteland live. 

The citizens of the wasteland are spiritually dead. They do not like to be disturbed from their futile routine of the modern life. April is traditionally regarded as symbol of spring, and rebirth, while water is a symbol of decay and death. But here April is the cruelest month for modern wastelanders, for it signifies rebirth and reminds them of their spiritual decay and makes them think of regeneration. The lines from the poem express the agony clearly,

“April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain”

In the second episode, the seer Tiresia described a true wasteland of ‘stony rubbish’ in it, he said, man can be recognized only as ‘a heap of broken images.’ This vision consists only of nothingness, a handful of dust. No longer is a religious phenomenon achieved through Christ, truth is represented by mere void. Here speaker becomes very much pessimistic about the future of the world. He from this modern world because,

“What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter,

The cricket no relief

And the dry stone no sound of water.”

In this lines one can here again the voice of Tiresia, who depicts a sort of spiritual wasteland. It portrays an agonized world filled with ‘stony rubbish’ where ‘the sun beats’ mercilessly down so that ‘the dead trees give no shelter’ and they shrill cry of the cricket bring ‘no relief’

The second and the third part of the poem throws light on the failure of sex relationship in the modern wasteland. Sex has become a matter of source or pleasure and lost its spiritual significance. The sexual life has lost spirituality and it has become a work without any real pleasure of both body and mind.

Further, through the famous clairvoyants Madame Sosotris, Eliot has shown how a card represents symbolically the dryness in religion. Cleanthes Brooks writes,

“Madame Sosotris has fallen a long way, from the height of her predecessors. She is engaged merely in vulgar.  Fortune telling is merely one item in a generally vulgar civilization. But the symbols of the Tarot pack are still unchanged. The various characters are still inscribed on the cards.”

Here is a card Belladonna, the lady of the Rocks, and the lady of sex-situations. Here is yet another card of the man with three sticks. One more card represents the wheel. Here is another card of one eyed merchant. The one eyed merchant is the modern man whose eye of commerce had survived, but whose second eye of religion is blinded. There is also one card which is blank. In the ancient world, both religion and commerce were united for the good of the community. 

Next, the protagonist Tiresias appears on the stage ad addresses his friend Stetson, who is walking in a London street. Tiresias questions to Stetson about corps which he has planted in his garden,

“That corps you planted last year in your garden,

Has is begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?”

This reference is to the burial of Christ and resurrection later on. If one has faith in god, resurrection is possible. The corps will spout into a new life. But with the loss of faith in religion, resurrection and rebirth will become meaningless. The basic idea is that under the conditions of the modern civilization, with the loss of faith in moral and spiritual values, rebirth of man is improbable.

In the second part ‘A Game of Chess’, T.S. Eliot has shown how sex has become matter of moves and counter moves, a source of momentary of seduction and exploitation of the innocent.

The title of the second part comes from Thomas Middleton’s play A Game of Chess, which satirizes a royal marriage based on political expediency. In act II of Middleton’s play, women beware women; a mother is kept engaged in a chess game while her daughter in law is being seduced in another room on the stage balcony visible to the audience. This symbolizes the perversion of sexual values in the contemporary world of desolation. Sex has become a matter of intrigue and seduction, and thus the cause of spiritual death and dissipation.

In the second part of ‘A Game of Chess’, we are given a picture of spiritual emptiness, but this time, at the other end or the social scales, a reflected in the talk between two cokerrey women in a London pub,

“If you don’t like, you can get on with it, I said

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off it, it won’t be lake of telling

I can’t help it, she said, pulling along face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off.”

In these lines two women are talking with each other and one is Lil. Lil’s friend is advising her to look smart, beautiful and attractive as her husband is coming back after world war and his husband even wants her to look young. Further her friend advises her that if you won’t change yourself it may happen that he chooses other woman who is more young and attractive. Here it shows that even for married couple love and feelings are not of matter, but sexual pleasure is at the centre and if man does not like his wife, and her physical look, he easily goes to other woman. It shows that loyalty does not matter for modern people.

In the third part of the poem, ‘The Fire Sermon’, Eliot has described a river of London. Even Spenser has written a poem on the rivers of London. But here we can see a difference that in Spenser’s poem London river is dominated by nymphs and their paramours but now in 20^th century, London river the paramours are now the loitering heirs of city-directors.

The river itself is a source of life and symbol of purity and spirituality but in modern time, it is just a place of young generation for hang-outs only. It can be seen in below lines,

“The river bears no empty bottles,

Sandwich papers, silk handkerchiefs,

Cardboard boxes, cigarette ends or

Other testimony of summer nights.

The nymphs are departed. And their

Friends loitering heirs of city directors

Departed, have left no address.”

Sex-relationship in the middle is equally mechanical and it can be seen in the relationship between the typist and clerk. A typist easily gives herself to her lover and after having sex, she does not even care even about him and remarks,

“Well now that’s done; and I am glad it’s over”

It shows in modern time sex has become just a momentary pleasure, it does not make couple to come closer even emotionally. For them it is a work and more than that it is a kind of animal-copulation.

Further, in this part even the songs of three Thames Daughters clearly show sexual exploitation. They can do nothing about it. It can be seen in below lines.

Second daughter:-

“My feet are at Moorgate and my heart under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised a new start. I made no comment.”

And the last section of The Wasteland, ‘What the Thunder Said?’, can be viewed as  a series of culmination reflection and experience. This part is full of the reminders of physical and spiritual dying. It is a complex pattern of the forms of dying. The death of Jesus, the living death of those who have failed to recognize its meaning, spiritual meaning of life as a preparation for dying…Here the god has now died, and the source of spirituality is cut now.

“He who was living is now dead,

We who were living are now dying.”

It means that till the God existed, we were living both physically and spiritually or mentally, but now with the death of Jesus, we are dying gradually. It’s not physical death but a spiritual one.

To cnclude my topic, I would say that the poem The Wasteland mainly throws light on the disillusionment and spiritual dryness of the post-war generation and at a time it would be wrong to say even as it is a main distemper of the modern age without any solution or hope or spirituality in society and people. Eliot has proved that history repeats itself, as the past and present are telescoped by the time or Tiresia that what happened in the past is happening even today, in modern age. Sexual perversion has always led to spiritual degradation and decay. Even in modern age, we can see the sins of soldiers, sexual violence by men on women like Philomela and three daughters and still the tongue is cut by the sinner so that a modern Philomela cannot reveal the act of molestation. It is all cause of spiritual degradation.