Thomas Stearns Eliot received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1948 for his outstanding contribution to the world of poetry today. One of his pioneering works is The Wasteland. For Eliot, the wilderness symbolizes that zone of human life where men exist without a faith to guide them, where men have turned their backs on spiritual enlightenment, and the title points to this dilemma.
The poem, divided into five parts, is thus fragmented, lacking in logical continuity and temporal sequence, and is a projection of the psychological oscillations and conflicts that raged in the soul of man at the beginning of the 20th century (the situation is no different today). . Eliot felt that Western civilization had become mechanical, boring, and dehumanized. Corruption, degeneracy, and stark materialism were rampant. In this broken and fragmented world, nothing could be integrated.
Although the poem is an irregular kaleidoscopic entity, it is held together only in the all-encompassing prophetic vision of Tiresias, the bisexual blind seer of ancient Greek tragedy, and what Tiresias sees is the substance of the entire poem. Psychologically speaking, it is the consciousness of humanity. As a symbol of the past that still survives in the present, the old Tiresias, “with his wrinkled feminine breast”, has suffered everything that is being represented on the ugly stage of the contemporary world.
He transcends the barrier of time and place with quick flashes embracing with his empty gaze, now a scene in the present: the images of “the ruins of the collapsing London Bridge”, a “pulsing and waiting taxi”, to personify the life of an immoral and lascivious typist of the 20th century, as well as of the past -Dante’s inferno, Cleopatra’s love game, Elizabeth- and reveals in our mental image the enormity of the sin committed by the mythical king Oedipus of Thebes – the drought- and -land ravaged by sin- in his sexual violation of his mother Jocasta, and of the need to purify the sinner’s soul through suffering.
In The Wasteland, images and symbols fall broadly into two categories: images taken from the ordinary aspects of urban life but raised to great intensity (the throbbing image of the taxi), and symbols of myth, nature and religion, centered on the theme of death and rebirth. Thus, drought symbolizes spiritual dryness and rain spiritual fertility. However, certain objects can symbolize two opposite ideas depending on their functions. Thus, water is, on the one hand, a symbol of creation – of life and growth, of purification and transformation, in the form of a river or sea, and on the other hand, it is also destructive of life and property. Similarly, fire as a destructive agent is symbolic of the lust that consumes a person to a state of “living death”; but fire, as the sacred flame of the altar, is also a symbol of inspiration, illumination and spiritual exaltation. Eliot constantly plays with ambivalent images.
From post-war European society, its spiritual sterility is conveyed through the symbol of stony, barren soil. The idea of an impasse, of life reaching a dead end, is conveyed by the symbol of the ‘game of chess’. The idea of life as a meaningless, boring and languid movement in a narrow circle is conveyed by the image “we are living in a rat’s alley where the dead lost their bones.” The idea is reinforced by the images of misery and vulgarity, for example, the river sweats oil and tar and drags in its current the dirty cargo of empty bottles, cigarette butts, silk scarves and other testimonies of summer parties and sexual encounters. between city nymphs and their casual lovers.
The theme of barrenness, decay, and death is interwoven with the quest for life and resurrection that Eliot found in the Holy Grail legend and other anthropological myths, with a sprinkling of Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu religious analogies, and the The sense of liberation from this state and of freedom is transmitted by the image of a boat that slides smoothly under the expert hand, God, who balances all the setbacks that man has made in the stupid belief of his superiority and, therefore, of his superiority. his own aggrandizement.
The Wasteland is Eliot’s spiritual autobiography, his search through the junk heap of modern culture for an integrating principle just as you would Pilgrim’s Progress (John Bunyan’s From this world to that is to come). Eliot’s vision moves back and forth in a relentless back-and-forth movement over legend, belief, and symbol. And, in the end, the pilgrim, now apparently a solitary figure, continues walking. The grass is “singing” and a moist flavor arrives, it brings rain”, a symbol of rejuvenation, of resurrection. Three thunders are heard, and the voice of thunder, in Sanskrit, offers three words of advice: “Give, pity. and control” – “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih”, the peace that passes all understanding. Eliot sees the solution to the human situation in Hindu religious terms.
Eliot imposes on us the problem of the wasteland because we, whether we know it or not, are the citizens of the “unreal city” and we must find our Grail: the plate used by Jesus at the Last Supper and in which one of his followers received His blood at the Crucifixion.