The Waste Land is not a collection of fragments for every part of it is connected with the others, not in conventional way, but by means of a complicated system of echoes, contrasts, parallels and allusions. Elucidate. ; What are the technical devises used by the poet to import unity to the poem.
Opinions of Critics:
The waste land has been criticized by a number of critics as fragmentary and formless. It has been called a series of poems rather than a single poem. According to some it is a group of separate poems loosely strung together. Others feel that it is a parade of the poet's learning. Some critics understand that there is no story or movement in the poem. The poet keeps beating about the bush without reaching any conclusion. However, on a careful study of the poem it has been found that there is a thin and subtle thread which runs throughout the poem and gives it a sort of unity. This pertains to the evils of civilizations and how civilization can be saved.
The Mythical Method:
However the poet has used a number of devices to import unity to his material. He has applied the mythical method to give form to what is apparently formless and to vivify and convey the spiritual degeneracy of the contemporary city. The mythical method consists in seeking analogies for the present in the past . The present is compared with the past and both similarities and contrasts are thus revealed. A myth is used as a norm or pattern to measure the anarchy and confusion and degeneracy of the present and attention is thus focused on the moral confusion in post war European society. The mythical method has certain advantages, it provides a pattern, a way of controlling and ordering and giving shape to what is shapeless and chaotic, it provides a norm for measuring the extent of degeneracy in contemporary Europe, it shows that the present spiritual predicament is an ever-recurring phenomena and so a universal significance is imparted to it, it emphasizes the wide gulf which separates the present godless humanity from the early human society when spiritual values were intact, in this way the poet is able to compress whole ages within a short span and the poem gains in comprehensiveness and as the myth from tradition are well-known, the use of the mythical method aids the poet in communicating his meaning.
Myths: Their Pattern of Birth and Re-Birth:
Eliot himself acknowledges in his notes to The Waste Land that he was profoundly influenced by Miss Weston's book from Ritual to Romance and Frazer's The Golden Bough. The two authors have analyses a number of myths and shown that a common, every recurrent pattern runs through all myths. In the nature myths there is winter signifying death and spring signifying re- birth. In the fertility myth, land's fertility is lost in a period of draught and it returns with rain. Thus there is death followed by re-birth. This process of birth and death and re-birth was expressed through numerous vegetation ceremonies and rituals. Thus in Egypt the effigy of the fertility God, crisis was stuck with grain all over and was buried. The grain sprouted and this signified the re-birth of vegetation God. This process of birth and re-birth has been spiritualized in Christianity, there is crucification of Christ and his resurrection or re-birth to redeem humanity from sin is promised.
Sexual Perversion: Spritual Sterility:
Such is the central motif of all these myths of the past. Besides this, in them there is an emphasis on the sanctity of sex. There is decay and Spritual degeneracy whenever the sexual function is perverted. The purpose of the sexual function is procreation and it is sanctified only in marriage. When the sexual act is separated from procreation there is Spritual degeneracy. In modern society there is perversion of sex and hence its degeneracy. Sex has been separated from love, marriage and procreation. The sex-act has become beastly or mere animal copularion and hence there is decay and Spritual degeneracy. Hence in Eliot's poetry man is often likened to animals. Eliot finds analogy or the objective correlative for the modern waste land in three other waste lands (1) the medieval wast land of the fisher King, a myth which is closely related with the grail legend, (2) the waste land of Oedipus, King of Thebes in Ancient Greece and (3) the biblical evil land of emmaus. Salvation in each case lies in rising above the merely physical and the sensuous in the sublimation of sexual Union into higher Union of human soul with God. The modern wast land resembles them in its sin and consequent spiritual death, but differs from them in as much as there are no signs yet of salvation or redemption for it. Redemption is brought about by purification through suffering, but the modern crowds lead a negative existence and are unwilling to take the pains necessary for redemption. They have lost all faith in moral and religious values. Their life is an aimless wandering without any fixed goal. Purification ceremonies, religious ceremonies and sex, have lost their original value and there is pervation of values all round. This is symbolised by, "the heaps of broken images". Water has merely become destructive, and is no longer a source of purification.
Frequent Use of Ironic Contrasts
This distortion of values is brought out frequently by means of ironic contrasts. Thus Mrs. Porter washes her feet in 'soda water', not to purify. her spirit, but to make her skin fairer to catch and befool more males:The sound of horns and motors, which shall bring.
Sweeney to Mrs Porter in the spring. O the Moon shone bright on Mrs Porter
And on her daughter
They wash their feet in soda water.
When lovely woman stoops to folly and
Paces about her room again, alone.
She smoothes her hair with automatic hand
And puts a record on the gramophone.
However, it may be pointed out here that Eliot's use of irony is not always so simple. As on the surface the contrast between the original use of the Tarot Pack and the use of which Madame Sosostris puts it is ironical. This is the surface irony but there is in addition a deeper irony, the Sophoclean irony as well. Her fortune-telling is true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does not think it to be true, but the truth is realised by Eliot's 20th century readers. There are also numerous instances of obverse irony, i.e., there are passages and allusions of which the ironical implications are not understood at the time but become clear only when, in the course of the poem, they are related to the theme of the poem. The various allusions to The Tempest are examples of this kind of irony. The mythical technique imparts unity by emphasising the similarity of all experience.
Tiresias as a Unifying Link
Another unifying link in The Waste Land is Tiresias, the old, blind prophet of King Oedipus of Thebes, and the protagonist or the central figure in the poem. He is the unifying symbol and the substance of the poem is made up of what he sees and hears. He is the all-knowing one, gifted not only with immortality but also with the prophetic vision. He is bi- sexual, he has had most varied experiences and so he symbolises human consciousness, the knowledge and experience acquired by the race through the ages. He is the connecting link between the past and the present, he is both of the past and the present. 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 agonised drama of human life. He is the 'voice of sensitive humanity', 'the conscience of humanity', deploring its spiritual degeneration in the modern world. It is he who exposes by his comments the spiritual vacuity, the triviality, the monotony, the aimlessness of contemporary civilisation, its sick hurry and divided aims. He is a unifying symbol without whom The Waste Land would be a phantas- magoria, a nightmare, a series of disconnected scenes and meaningless talks, incoherent and confused. Tiresias assumes many masks and his voice alternates with the voices of the inmates of the modern waste land, and at times with the ghostly voices from the past. The poem is seen to be a single whole in the fact that its substance is formed of Tiresias' stream of consciousness.Oneness of Character
Not only does Tiresias melt into the other characters of the poem, but, "the melting of the characters, into each other is, of course, an aspect of the general process". Thus Elizabeth, the Hyacinth girl Lil, and three Thames nymphs, melt into one another. The effect created is, "a sense of the oneness of experience, and of the unity of all periods".The Sequence of Pictures
Those who criticise the poem for its lack of unity should also remember that in it, T.S. Eliot has used the technique of the cinematograph. Just as in a cinema-film, so in the poem, there are a series of shots transcending time and place, meaningless if considered separately, but taken together forming a coherent whole. In this way, time and space have been conquered and contemporary problem has been given a universal and permanent significance. The Waste Land is made up of a number of successive pictures which after a few readings fix themselves in the memory and convey a coherent whole of meaning.
This sequence of pictures is central to The Waste Land as poetry.