[ad_1]
T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, a poem on the spiritual dryness and the kind of existence in which no regenerating belief gives significance, gives the reader a sense of familiarity to all the incidents in the poem, which is plying on the collective unconscious of the reader. While reading the poem one comes to see it no only as a critique of the people’s value of daily life in the apex of the twentieth century calamities, but also an assessment of Man’s life and his mishaps throughout the history of humanity. The most significant unifying factor of this through history is the always-present character of Thiresias, who as a permanent mythic figure is present in the all stages of human history and mythologies; from the heroic time of Odysseus, and the heroes of Iliad to the tragic period of Sophocles in Greece, and now in the life of modern man. This figure makes the poem a through and a true history of humanity. In this study I am to unveil this latent historic content in ‘The Waste Land’, and represent the poem’s potential capacity to be read in the light of New-Historicism.
As one reads The Waste Land, different stages of history become foregrounded as a through history of humanity. Due to formalist critics to foreground is to bring to something into prominence, to make it dominant in perception. As these critics believed, poetry works by back-grounding the referential aspects and the logical connections; hence it foregrounds those unattended aspects and leads to a defamiliarized experience. So does ‘The Waste Land’ by giving images of death by the water, the burial, game of chess, thunder, and etc. which are regarded as universal images in human collective unconscious, though the poem represent the images in a context that defamiliarizes by foregrounding them.
Besides, that historians can articulate a unified and internally consistent worldview of any given people, country, or era and can reconstruct an accurate and objective picture of any historical event based on such background are key assumptions that Cultural poetics or New-Historicism challenges. One of the principals of the New-Historicism and its counterparts is that the relation between literature and history must be rethought. They assert that time is not a stable and fixed history which can be treated as the background against which literature can be foregrounded. As the new historians have set forth all history is foreground at any given time. (Bressler, 2007. 215-225)
In this regard we can consider ‘The Waste Land’ as a unified history of humanity. The poem consists of five parts, that each discusses a specific foregrounded period of human’s history. By the way, the most outstanding feature of the poem is the representation of a character named Thiresias; a man of the ancient times who is present, still, into the modern period. Thiresias is present in most of the significant incidents in history and mythology which brings together different aspects of the history, and now Eliot has brought him into the disastrous era of twentieth century. He is a character that foregrounds different stages of the history in the poem, unifies the poem and humanity throughout history; and therefore, through these bringing together the historical eras by one linking character the poem becomes a through history of humanity.
Noteworthy, ‘The Waste Land’, in the first look appears as a chaotic and incoherent piece; however, if read thoroughly some strong unifying clues can be seen that makes its chaos an aesthetic whole. The poem has five parts, each in a particular setting. The pronouns suggest a stable identity for the speaker but much else has already become unstable in each part of the poem, landscape has given way to cityscape. However, as for the identity of the speaker we can conclude that a strain exists between the presumed identity of the poem’s speaker and the instability of the speaker’s world. If this is the speech of one person, it has the range of many personalities and many voices of male and female, while all are one. Certainly if we identify the speaker of the poem; the person that winter kept warm and summer had surprised and the one who stops, goes on, drinks coffee and talks, certain continuity would be restored. Discontinuity, in other words, is no more firmly established than continuity. Therefore we can conclude that the un-unified poem is continuous and unified and there should be a unifying factor in it. Hence this unifying factor can be nothing but a character-speaker- that exists throughout the history of the poem. And this historical character is Thiresias.
Moreover, if analyzed stylistically, we would come to the consequence that in any given line there are stylistic features which will bind it to a subsequent or previous line, in this way suggesting a continuous speaker. In this regard we have to answer two questions. The first one is about the identity of the continuous speaker; who is it? To answer it we need to identify the historical character that exists throughout the history of the poem. Certainly this character is Thiresias, even male or female; because he is the ancient foreseer that has lived as a female for some years, and we can trace him in each part of the poem. We come to the conclusion that despite the chaotic appearance ‘The Waste Land’ is a unified poem and the unifying factor is the old Thiresias. Then how can we justify the different historical periods and settings in each part of the poem. Answering this second question is easy if we again analyze the existence of the old fortune-teller, Thiresias.
He is not a character of one era; he had been present in all the ancient time, even the great Oedipus had him as his adviser. It is not the fate that rules him; it is he who governs the fate and fortune. So he can be present in all periods. He is an intermittent phenomenon in the poem. Thus, in this way the historical periods do not matter at all; they are not a background on which the poem be constructed, all the history is foregrounded. The differences of the periods would dissolve in the whole history of the poem, because it is the whole history that comes to foreground and becomes concised in Thiresias.
Now can we, finally, consider The Waste Land as the history of humanity? A history of humanity should have two features; first there should be a historical account of the world and then a history of all individual men on earth. And this postmodern poem has put these features together very carefully and artistically. It has the whole history of the world as its matter of discussion; all the world’s incidents, either in history or in literature, had been alluded in the five part of the poem. However, they are not reported fragmentarily. All the fragments had been put together as incidents happening to one individual and so they make a unified whole. And this individual is the old Thiresias.
He is a harmonizing consciousness and a more encompassing point of view. The principle of order in The Waste Land depends on a plurality of consciousness, an ever-increasing series of points of view which struggle towards an emergent unity and then continue to struggle past that unity. Then The Waste Land is a concised history of the world and man’s life on earth; and therefore, it becomes a history of humanity with all its ups and downs and catastrophes, all unified in the experience of Thiresias.
All things considered within this perspective, any foregrounded history will be provisional and therefore it is the whole history and comes to discuss, analyze and criticize the whole fortunes and misfortunes of human being throughout this history. Hence a good reading of ‘The Waste Land’ must begin, then, with recognition that while it expressed Eliot’s own way of the time, it has the history of humanity in the background. But not as a background upon which the poem is constructed, whole it is composed of fragments and each of these fragments of history makes the whole history foregrounded. Therefore we have the whole history of humanity in the foreground and we have to deal with this whole history in each moment of the poem. And finally, at the end of the poem we all the fragments as a whole and the whole history of humanity become foregrounded at once.
[ad_2]
Source by Mohammad Mahdi Kashani Lotf Abadi
