T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

T.S. Eliots The waste material - Essay ExampleWhat Tiresias sees, Eliot tells us, is the substance of the poem. But it is the nature of Tiresias vision that is our concern.There are three caput stories about Tiresias, all of them relevant. In Oedipus Rex, sitting by Thebes below the wall he knew why, and as a consequence of what violent death and what illicit amour, the pestilence had fallen on the unreal city, but declined to tell. In the Odyssey he walked among the lowest of the dead and evaded predicting Odysseus death by water the encounter was somehow necessary to Odysseus homecoming, and Odysseus was somehow satisfied with it, and did get home, for a while. In the Metamorphoses he underwent a change of sex for watching the duo of snakes presumably the occasion on which he fore(prenominal)suffered what is tonight enacted on this same divan or bed. He is often the prophet who knows but withholds his knowledge, just as Hieronymo, who is mentioned at the close of the poem, kne w how the tree he had lay in his garden came to bear his dead son, but was compelled to withhold that knowledge until he could write a play which, like The Waste Land, employs several languages and a framework of allusions impenetrable to anyone but the hypocrite lecteur. It is an unavoidable shared guilt that makes us so intimate with the contents of this strange deathly poem it is also, in an age that has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of psychology and anthropology (After such knowledge, what forgiveness), an inescapable morbid beneficence with everyone else, very destructive to the coherent personality, that (like Tiresias years as a wo composition) enables us to join with him in fore suffering all. These sciences afford us an illusion of understanding other people, on which we build sympathies that in an nonesuch era would have gone out with a less pathological generosity, and that are as promising as not projections of our self-pity and self-absorption, vices for whic h Freud and Frazer afford dangerous nourishment. Tiresias is he who has lost the sense of other people as inviolably other, and who is capable neither of pity nor terror but only of a fascination spuriously link to compassion, which is merely the twentieth centurys special mutation of in residual.The dissociation of sensibility cataloged by Eliots imagery traces the dissociation of exclusive senses from each other in the absence of any intellectual Aufhebung into a logos. There is a broad irony, for example, in Eliots assertion that what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. Tiresias blindness should, according to myth, grant him a vision of the truth. What he sees in Eliots poem is a troping of the primal scene in the mechanical copulation of the typist and the young man carbuncular. The metric, the rhyme scheme, and the ending sight of the automatic hand that puts a record on the gramophone impose a feeling of remorseless repetition of a scene foresuffered a th ousand times in memory and desire. Tiresias endlessly sees the scene of the crime, the origin of his own blinding or castration in witnessing the difference between men and women. What Tiresias sees is substance itself, physical life (or signifiers) unredeemed by spirit (or a preternatural signified). Eliots note plays on the philosophic sense of substance as essence and tacitly reminds us of its worsening into mere matter. In some legends, Tiresias loses his eyes in retaliation for looking upon the naked body of the cleanse Athena, goddess of wisdom. In the version from Ovid that Eliot quotes as of great anthropological interest, we have