Shantih, Shantih, Shantih

Mainly because its name intrigued me, I chose to focus on Maud Ellman's article, "A Sphinx Without a Secret," from the Norton as a way to organize and complement my own reading of the Waste Land -- a poem which quite obviously could be analyzed throughout the rest of my natural life without exhausting its critical possibilities. Luckily, Ellman's interpretation confirmed my own initial suspicions that the work might be in many ways an examination of text and the literary tradition's own status as a "waste land" of interrelated but pastiched references. In other words, the Waste Land is a poem about poetry, and one that like the "sphinx" is "symbol of the symbolic itself" because it "does not know the answer to its own question" (Ellman, 259) (by extension, Eliot problematizes literature as a medium of such "answers" or truth). Though Ellman does not choose to focus on another of Eliot's iconic classical females, the Sybil, I propose that, with its rotting (feminine) corporeality, eternal life, and status as a publicized mass spectacle -- not to mention its rhyme with "symbol" --the Sybil also operates as a stand-in for the status of text in modernism, one whose elements are displaced and dispersed throughout the Waste Land.

Indeed, while Eliot's misogyny towards the female body is rampant throughout this work, his inclusion of the Philomela myth not only, as Ellman argues, act as a way to demonstrate the silencing aspects of male violence, but in addition displays how modernity reduces both literature and speech to brief allusions, snippets, and "soundbites". For example, note how Philomela's remaining voice that calls out "twit twit twit" "So rudely forc'd / Tereu" (203-6) directly reflects the broken jingles and nursery rhymes of "O O O O that Shakespearean rag" (128) and "London bridge is falling down falling down falling down" (426). The result of such inclusions is a sense of cacophony and disjunction from the "higher" allusions to Shakespeare and the classics; indeed, Eliot's references at times seem self-negating.

To further relate Eliot's use of gender and textuality, I will now explore his use of Tiresias as an androgynous middle-ground between author, reader, and text. Emily (Eichler), I found your idea that the Waste Land's narrator may be at least at times feminine to be interesting, particularly in a context where, as Ellman states, "it is a collapse of boundaries that centrally disturbs the text" (262). While the Waste Land's speaker transitions from the feminine roles of "Marie" and the silenced Philomela, the author is of course male, which perhaps creates a hierarchical ambivalence between masculine and feminine, author/speaker and reader. Tiresias fills these gaps through his ambiguous status as a hermaphrodite and a blind seer, as well as an observer and voyeur to the poetry's action: "I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest" (229). What he perceives is of course an unsatisfying act of physical copulation (a state that may be more visceral due to Eliot's own sexual misfortunes and corporal struggles).

In accordance with the poem's obvious theme of sterility, Tiresias is impotent as both male subject and female object and unable to bequeath concrete nourishment to his audience. While Tiresias becomes the all-encompassing speaker with many voices, he also implicates us in his voyeurism: through the Waste Land's speaker, the reader obtains coy glimpses of both the literary tradition and seedy modern realities, but without a sense of consummation or closure. Like the symbol/Sybil, he embodies both physical degeneration and occult prescience. Ultimately, the speaker in Eliot's schema remains an incorporeal cipher; however, Eliot may be positing here the necessity of literature's removal from the concrete aspects of daily modern life for its voice to regain power. Like Philomela, the text may reach a purer state of art (Ellman, 260s) shed of its citationality -- but then it would be "feminized" and disempowered (particularly in regards to the historic gender inequality of classical education).

These analytic dilemmas were clarified for me after reading Ellman's article, in which she acknowledges Eliot to be both a "vicar" and a "blasphemer" of the literary tradition. However, I would extend her point further to critique some conventional interpretations that present Eliot's use of biblical and Upanishad motifs, as well as his final blessing of "shantih shantih shantih," to be messages of immanent hope. Eliot's references to Exodus (the "dry stone" beginning in line 24) and Ecclesiastes ("the dead tree gives no shelter," 23) are interwoven with the rest of his pastiche. Therefore, Eliot starkly demonstrates the textuality, and thus indeterminacy, of theology (God and logos!): it cannot logically represent an independent, removed force here. Religious texts, ironically like the dead tree or dry stone, are no shelter from modernity's subjectivities.