An Analysis of the Polyphony of the Waste Land from Bakhtin's

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to a number of people who have given me valuable advice and encouragement in writing this thesis. Without their help, this thesis would have never come into being. I must, first of all, express my thanks in particular to my tutor Professor LinYupeng whose help plays a decisive role in my choosing this topic. His suggestive and constructive views on multi-voice in The Waste Land offer me much help and are indispensable to the completion of this thesis. 1am also grateful to my teacher Professor Han Jianghong，who has constantly been a source of encouragement and useful advices. And thanks also go to Professor Hu Zuoyou, Professor Ren Jingsheng, Associate Professor Tang Jun and Professor Zhao Sumei who have greatly benefited my intellectual growth through their kind suggestions. My special thanks also go to Prof. Wang Dongfeng, dean of the School of Foreign Studies in Zhongshan University. After listening to his lecture, I began to take interest in the life and theories of Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin. Besides, the heartfelt thanks are given to my dear sister, Mao Junlin, who helped me find documents in national library of China and send these papers to me by air from Beijing. I also own a debt of gratitude to my parents for their love and support.

复义之声颠覆之音—巴赫金复调理论读《荒原》

摘要

《荒原》是托·斯·艾略特的代表作，该诗彻底打破了以往的文学传统。“复调”思想是巴赫金理论体系中最重要的思想之一。本文透过巴赫金的复调思想这个独特的视角解读《荒原》，发现在《荒原》一诗隐含了众多的声音。如在第一章《四月的葬礼》中隐含了神谕的声音和世俗的声音；过去的声音，现在的声音和未来的声音；人物的声音作者的声音。在第二章《对弈》中隐含了神话的声音和现实的声音，男性的声音和女性的声音；神圣不可侵犯的声音和亵渎的声音。在第三章《火诫》中隐含了严肃的和讽刺的声音，长者的声音和幼者的声音；佛教的观点和基督教的教义。在第五章《雷霆的话》中隐含了社会的声音和宗教的声

音，以及 DA 这个词体现的多声部的复调特点。《荒原》一诗中多元的声音蕴含着颠覆权威的力量，有助于重建疲惫无力的战后社会。隐含在《荒原》中众多平民

阶层的声音旨在颠覆疲惫无力的官方话语。通过巴赫金复调理论对艾略特《荒原》一诗的解读不难发现，诗歌字里行间里隐含着众多声音。《荒原》里的所有声音都是平等的，它们从占统治地位的权威

声音中脱离出来，自由的发表各自的看法，体现出《荒原》中蕴含的民主思想。本文共分为六章，第一章介绍艾略特的生平、艾略特最有影响力的著作《荒原》以及《荒原》一诗的社会背景。第二章总结了东西方文学批评界对艾略特《荒原》一诗的研究评论。第三章的理论框架简单阐释了巴赫金的复调思想。第四章是文章的主体，就《荒原》每一章的复调特色逐一解析。第五章阐述了在巴赫金复调理论的视角下，《荒原》一诗显现出的社会价值。第六章得出结论：《荒原》

中复义的声音中蕴含着颠覆的力量有助于实现明主理想，重建人类文明。

关键词：复调，《荒原》，复义，颠覆的声音

Voices of Plurality and Subversion – An Analysis of the Polyphony of The Waste Land from Bakhtin’s Theory

ABSTRACT

The poem The Waste Land is the masterpiece of T.S Eliot, which totally breaks up with the previous literary trend. This paper aims to analyze Eliot’s famous poem The Waste Land by applying Bakhtin’s polyphony theory, which is one of the most important theories in Baktin’s theory system. It is discovered that there exist polyphonic features in almost every part of The Waste Land . For instance, there are oracular voices and individual voices; past，present and future voices, character’s voices and the poet’s voices in “The Burial of the Dead”; there are mythic voices and realistic voice, feminine voices and masculine voices and inviolable voices and profaned voice in “A Game of Chess”; there are serious and ironical voices, aged voices and youthful voices ,the Buddhism and Christianity voices in “The Fire Sermon”; and there are social voice and religion voice and the polyphony of the thunder’s word “DA” in “What the Thunder Said”. By analyzing The Waste Land from Bakhin’s polyphonic theory, the hidden voices between the lines are released from the dominate power, each voice is equal and is free to express their own viewpoint which adds to the democratic feature of The Waste Land. The plural voices own the subversive power, which aims to rebuild the restless and futile society. The voices of common people from every social status are heard; therefore the subversive plural voices are with the purpose of fighting against the disabled official voices. This thesis is divided into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 briefly introduces the life of T.S Eliot together with his most influential work The Waste Land and the social background

information of The Waste Land. Chapter 2 is a summary of the critical reviews both from western critical circle and from Chinese scholars who have done industrial study of The Waste Land. Chapter3 is the theoretical framework, which is a general introduction to Bakhtin and the polyphonic theory. Chapter4 is the main part of the thesis. It discusses the polyphonic feature of The Waste Land in each episode and the social value of The Waste Land in Chapter5. Finally, Chapter 6 is a conclusion that the voices of plurality own the subversive power, which is useful for us to realize the democratic social ideality and to restore the glory of human civilization.

Keywords：polyphony, The Waste Land, plurality, subversive voice

Table of Contents

Chapter1 Introduction...………………………………………………………...... 1 1.1 Introduction of T.S Eliot and his The Waste Land………………………………1 1.1.1 Introduction of T.S Eliot……………………………………………….1 1.1.2 Introduction of The Waste Land……………………………………………..2 1.2 Social Background of The Waste Land……………………………………………2 Chapter2 Literary Review…………………………………………………………4 Chapter3.Theoretical Framework……………………………………………….. 9

3.1 Bakhtin………………………………………………………………………..9 3.2 Polyphony Theory……………….…………………………………………..9 Chapter4 Polyphony in The Waste Land……………… ……………………………….11 4.1 Polyphony in the epigraph……………………………………………………...11 4.2 Polyphony in “The Burial of the Dead”………….…………………………….12 4.2.1 Past voice, present voice and future voice...……………………………12 4.2.2 Character’s voice and the poet’s voice …………………………………13 4.2.3 Oracular voices and individual voices ………………………………….15 4.3 Polyphony in “A Game of Chess”…………………...………………………….16 4.3.1 Mythic voice and realistic voice…………………………………………...16 4.3.2 Feminine voices and masculine voices…………………...... ……..17 4.3.3 Inviolable voice and profaned voice…..……………………………...19 4.4 Polyphony in “The Fire Sermon”……………….………………..….………….20 4.4.1 Serious voice and ironical voice…………………………………………20 4.4.2 Aged voices and youthful voices…..…….………………………….….…22 4.4.3 Buddhism and Christianity…………………………………………..……25 4.5 Polyphony in “What the Thunder Said”…………..…………………………….27 4.5.1 Religion and society…………………………………………………….…27

4.5.2 Polyphonic “DA” in fable of Upanishad…………………………….…….28 4.5.3 Polyphonic “DA” in The Waste Land………………………………………….29

Chapter5 Social significance of polyphony in The Waste Land ……………...…..32 5.1Similar social reason of emergence of polyphony and Eliot’s The Waste Land ……………………………………………………………………………………33 5.2 Social value of polyphony theory applied in The Waste Land ………………..33 Conclusion……..………………..………..……………………………………..…36 Work Cited…………………………………………………………………………..37 Appendix I 攻读研究生期间发表的论文...... 41

Chapter One INTRODUCTION

1.1 Introduction of T.S Eliot and his The Waste Land 1.1.1 Introduction of T.S Eliot Thomas Stern Eliot, poet, dramatist, and critic, was born in Saint Louis, Missouri, U.S.A, 1888. He studied at Harvard, where he was influenced by the New Humanist scholar and critic, Irving Babbitt, from whom he derived an attitude of opposition to 19th century Romanticism. Then he went to Europe and studied at Oxford and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he made himself familiar with the symbolist poets. During his studies, he mastered French, Italian, and English literatures, as well as ancient India philosophy and literature. He was probably the most erudite poet of his time. After settling in England, he first worked as a school teacher, then as a bank clerk. Meanwhile, he was also associated with Yeats and Ezra Pound, who encouraged him to write poetry. Eliot’s first important long poem The Love of J. Alfred Prufrock was published in 1917. His best known poem of The Waste Land was published in 1922.He founded and edited The Criterion, an influential literary review, then became, in 1925, the director of London publishing house, Faber & Faber Ltd. In 1927, he became a British subject and joined the Church of England. He declared that he was “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion” (Liu, 2004:484) . As a dramatist, he wrote seven plays. He made experiments in reviving verse drama which had flourished in Shakespeare’s time. Between 1935 and 1941, he published 4 long poems, Burnt Norton, East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, which were collected and republished as Four Quartets in 1943. Eliot was also a very influential and important critic. His essay Tradition and the Individual Talent appeared in his first volume of critical essays, and his The Sacred Wood was a manifesto of modernist poetry. In 1948 he was awarded the Nobel Prize of

Literature. 1.1.2 Introduction of The Waste Land The Waste Land is a poem of 433 lines, mainly free verse with occasional snatches of rhyme and with many quoted lines, references and allusions. Published in 1922 and regarded as a land mark of English poetry, it ended Romantic period and signified the emergence of Modernism. The Waste Land is divided into 5 parts: “The Burial of the Dead”, “A Game of Chess”, “The Fire Sermon”, “Death by the Water” and “What the Thunder Said.” As The Waste Land is difficult to understand by readers and critics, Eliot himself added many explanatory notes to it. The poem was dedicated to Ezra Pound. In January 1922, in Paris on the way back from Switzerland to London, Eliot showed Pound the manuscript of a chaotic poem of about a thousand lines, which was the original size of The Waste Land. Then Pound helped him to reduce it to the present 433 lines. The poem was first published in the UK, without the author's notes, in the first issue of The Criterion, a literary magazine started and edited by Eliot. The first appearance of the poem in the US was in the November 1922 issue of The Dial magazine. 1.2 Social background of The Waste Land The social context of The Waste Land was the First World War and its aftermath. The immediate postwar situation in Britain and Europe added to the sense of collapse and chaos. The disorder in Europe was particularly upsetting. In England, unstable governments and uncertain policies had lead to rising unemployment and general sense of drift when decisive leadership was needed. And the most unsettling of all was the peace conference in Paris in 1919, the Treaty of Paris brought hostility to the end, but it also brought bitterness, acrimony and desperation. The victorious powers used his power to take harsh revenge on their former anomies, which then led to a new and more terrible war in 1939. Besides reflecting the spirit of the time, The Waste Land was a very personal document as well. By the end of the First World War, Eliot has worried about money, about his wife’s abdominal and gynecological disorders and her increasingly fragile

mantle state. Thus, his feeling of nervous exhaustion became a growing sense of despair. Intellectual, spiritual, social crisis and the dilemma he faced in his marriage, which combined dread, desire, abjection, and depression in a single tangle of thought and feeling made his nerve breakdown. Just at this difficult moment of confusion, the most celebrated poem The Waste Land came out (Cooper, 2008: 63).

Chapter Two LITERARY REVIEW

The Waste Land is Eliot’s most influential work. When Eliot published this complex poem in 1922—first in his own literary magazine Criterion, then a month later in wider circulation in the Dial— it set off a critical firestorm in the literary world. The work was commonly regarded as one of the seminal works of modernist literature. Indeed, when many critics saw the poem for the first time, it seemed too modern to them. In the place of a traditional work, with unified themes and a coherent structure, Eliot produced a poem that seemed to incorporate many unrelated, little-known references to history, religion, mythology, and other disciplines. He even wrote parts of the poem in foreign languages, such as Hindi. In fact, the poem was so complex that Eliot felt the need to include extensive notes identifying the sources to which he was alluding, a highly unusual move for a poet, and a move that caused some critics to assert that Eliot was trying to be deliberately obscure or was playing a joke on them. The poem's reception was mixed. Burton Rascoe, reviewing the theme of The Waste Land for New York Tribune in November 1922, admired the poem primarily as an accurate assessment of the modern despair. Roscoe found The Waste Land to be “analysis and realism, psychology and criticism, anguish, bitterness and disillusion” (Rascoe,1922:8). For him, The Waste Land is an erudite despair. For another early critic of The Waste Land, Gilbert Seldes, who reviewed the poem for The Nation in December, the theme of the poem was equally pessimistic, “One feels simply that even in the cruelty and madness which have left their record in history and in art, there was an intensity of life, a germination and fruitfulness which are now gone…”( Seldes,1922:614 ) He believed that in The Waste Land, the inspiration had gone, and all hope was “buried deep” (Seldes,1922:615).Clearly, all these early reviewers saw The Waste Land as the assessment of the absolute decline of the modern

western world. Edmund Wilson, another early reviewer, who reviewed the Eliot poem in connection with several other recent works, most notably James Joyce’s Ulysses. Wilson believed that The Waste Land is a subjectification of social realities, but unlike Rascoes or Seldes who admired Eliot’s analysis, Wilson faulted Eliot’s vision on that basis, for such works as The Waste Land involved no belief in any sort of order—either moral or aesthetic. By playing off his thesis against the sort of the waste land motif that Eliot’s poem suggests, Wilson concluded that by virtue of such an aesthetic approach, “The human consciousness becomes a rag-bag, a rubbish heap” (Wilson,1922:237 ) . Wilson reviewed The Waste Land again in December, this time for the Dial. Although he entitled his later remarks “The Poetry of Drouth” (Wilson,1922:612) , he was much kinder to Eliot. Since Wilson was now using the annotated Boni & Liveright edition of The Waste Land, his kindness may be attributed to the assistance that Eliot’s notes rendered to critics attempting to understand the poem for itself. Wilson converted his former idea, like Rascoe and Seldes, viewed the poem as a statement of justifiable despair in the face of the emptiness of modern life. Louis Undermeyer, in a review of The Waste Land for The Freeman in January 1923, echoed both Wilson’s earlier reservations and his later admiration when Undermeyer called the poem “Mr. Eliot’s poetic variation on a super-refined futility” (Undermeyer,1923:56). According to Untermeyer, The Waste Land was an echo of contemporary despair, as a picture of dissolution. Also, he believed that Eliot, as a recorder of the nostalgia of his age, had created something which has a documentary value, though it remained a “misleading” document (Undermeyer, 1923:57). Conrad Aiken, Eliot’s friend from their Harvard undergraduate days, his approach was structural. For Aiken, the poem succeeded by virtue of its incoherence, not of its plan, by virtue of its explanation. Its incoherence was a virtue. Then, the extremely influential editor Harriet Monroe didn’t review The Waste Land for Poetry until March. Monroe told her readers Eliot “gives us the malaise of our time, its agony, its conviction of futility, its wild dance on ash heap before a clouded and distorted mirror… He shows us confusion and dismay and disintegration, the world

is cut into pieces and in a form of strange and irregular (Monroe,1923:22). In Monroe’s hands, The Waste Land was regarded as a commonplace book by his contemporary. It was Monroe who put Eliot in place and gradually become celebrity. An especially interesting exchange of views on The Waste Land occurred during the summer of 1923. John Crowe Ransom, reviewed the poem for the New York Evening Post Literary Review in mid-July. During the first week of August, a reader sent a letter refuting Ransom’s position. The reader was Allen Tate. Ransom had essentially assaulted Eliot for distorting both reality and aesthetic representations of reality. Ransom did not think much of that modernity of The Waste Land, for The Waste Land finally “seems to bring to a head all the special modern errors, and to cry for critics’ ink of a volume quite disproportionate to its merit as a poem” (Ransom,1923:826) . Ransom’s position was that the poet ought to be an imaginative synthesizer who counteracts rather than contributes to the disruptiveness of modern life, and it was that point that Tate disagree with. Tate insisted that there was a form in The Waste Land’s apparent formless and that form is found in Eliot’s use of literary allusions. Ransom had reduced them to nothing more than parody; Tate argued that they are effective ironies, and that very form of the poem was with ironic attitude. It was not until 1939 that Cleanth Brooks brought the critical approach of discover the thematic complexities of allusion in The Waste Land to full bloom in his essay “The Waste Land: Critique of the Myth” (Brooks,1939:25) . Helen McAfee touched on the poem briefly in an Atlantic Article, assessing what she called “the literature of disillusion” of the postwar era (McAfee,1923:227) . She believed that there were disastrous psychic scars that the war had left on the creative generation of young writers. The mood was black. It was as bitter as gall; not only with a personal bitterness, but also a world destroyed by a war without peace ideas (Helen McAfee,1923:228). The Waste Land was the first work of western secular literature to recognize and, more important, to illustrate, that no human value system was central to the needs of the entire human race, and yet “regarded as an experience which appears in a soul, the

whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.” (Bradley ,1897:412) That was Eliot’s citation from F.H.Bradley’s Appearance and Reality. From 1960s, most critics turned to semiotics, Marxist criticism, structuralism, and deconstruction. Because of Eliot’s opinions against romanticism, critics began to associate T.S.Eliot with the Romantic tradition. C.K.Stead gave his opinion in his New Poetic: From Teats to Eliot’s that British poetry developed towards two trends since romanticism: to develop towards popular poetry and to develop towards pure images. Imagism poetry including Eliot’s works pushed the second trend to its extreme（Stead, 1998:192). In the early 1970’s, the manuscript of The Waste Land was found in the United States. After this discovery, James E.Miller published T.S.Eliot’s Personal Waste Land(1977), which associated Eliot’s life with his writing in order to further explore the truth of The Waste Land. Recently, there are many critics who study Eliot’s philosophical and religious viewpoints, his life and experiences, among whom are A.D.Moody and Peter Ackroyd. In China, Most of Eliot’s poetry had been translated into Chinese since the 1930s. Prof. Ye Gongchao started the study of T.S Eliot in China. His article named Eliot’s Poetry was published on the volume2 No.2 of Tsinghua Journal, which was regarded as the earliest essay of Eliot Studies. Prof. ZhaoLuorui was the first translator of The Waste Land. She also did deep research of T.S.Eliot and his famous poem The Waste Land, which was reflected in her essay “T.S.Eliot and The Waste Land”. In Fact, the study of Eliot in Mainland China began only after the Open-door policy in the late 1970s. The focus of the study on T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land in the late 1980 was the implication and the artistic features of The Waste Land. The typical scholars of this period included Prof. ZhaoHengyi and Prof. MaoZhuming etc. Their articles with no exception used social-historical criticism method, and Prof. Zhao combined sociology with myth- archetype criticism to interpret Eliot’s The Waste Land. The study of Eliot and his The Waste Land made a great progress from mid-1980s

to mid-1990s. Mr. Qiu Xiaolong began to analyze The Waste Land in the cultural and historical context of its own. At the turn of the new century, there were many insightful research findings on T.S Eliot. More and more works on Eliot were published, one third of which discussing The Waste Land. It meant The Waste Land was still the scholars’ main interests. The essays of this period were mainly about the imploration of the meaning of The Waste Land and the poetical devices of this poem. In 1995, there was a symposium on Eliot launched in Dalian, China. Zhangjian ranked the most prominent critics in studying T.S Eliot and The Waste Land. Both had published monographs and essays on Eliot. ZhangJian focused on the relationship between T.S. Eliot and the English Romantic tradition, using cultural criticism to analyze Eliot’s work.

Chapter Three TEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

3.1 Bakhtin Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a Russian philosopher, literary critic, semiotician and scholar who worked on literary theory, ethics, and the philosophy of language. His writings, which covered a wide variety of subjects, inspired scholars working in a number of different traditions and in disciplines as diverse as literary criticism, history, philosophy, anthropology and psychology. Bakhtin lived in a turbulent time with the social context of wars, revolutions, famines, exiles, and purges. Having taken refuge from the hunger and confusion of civil war, Bakhtin returned to Leningrad in 1924, only finding that city has been devastated by war and recession. At that time, it was difficult for Bakhtin to find a job. He had few connections, and very little money. To make matters worse, Bakhtin was suffering from a bone disease that eventually necessitated the amputation of one of his legs. And the most unfortunate event which attacked Bakhtin was his arrest in 1929; although he was never told exactly why he had been picked up, it can reasonably be surmised that it was in connection with sweep of intellectuals associated with underground church. Bakhtin was arrested and sentenced to 10 years’ exile in the far north, and then with the help of his accompanies, the sentence is reduced to 6 years in Kazakhstan (Gardiner, 2003:37). 3.2 Polyphony Theory It was during this lean period that Bakhtin finished the insightful book Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics under his own name and put forward the notion of polyphony. Polyphony originally means the music which combines several simultaneous voice-part of individual design, in contrast to monophonic music, which consists of a single melody. Bakhtin’s term of polyphony borrows the conception of music, which means the co-presence of independent but interconnected voices (Apel,1969:19). It refers

precisely to the construction of the voices of characters and narrators in the novel, as its word origin – the Greek for “many voices”—suggests. Bakhtin’s music-derived trope of “polyphony” formulated from complex ideological voices in the work of Dostoevsky. Bakhtin argues that characters and narrators are known by their voices, rather than any other features, within the text, and it is the way in which these voices are arranged that determines whether a work is polyphonic or not. Bakhtin takes the novels of Dostoevsky as his central example of the polyphony text, as he argues that here characters were represented not as objects, who were manipulated and commented upon by an omniscient narrator, but as subjects, on an equal footing with the narrator, and the narrator does not have precedence over the character but has equal right to speak. The polyphonic novel is a democratic one, in which equality of utterance is central.

Chapter Four POLYPHONY IN THE WASTE LAND

According to Lukács, the nature of novel is not “homogeneously organic and stable” but “heterogeneous contingent and discrete”(Lukács, 1971:76), assuming plural voices of dependent characters. Friedrich Engels also argues that the more deeply the author’s own opinions are hidden, the better the novel is as a work of art. Bellow presents a similar view, declaring that a novel of ideas can be art only when character’s views become independent from that of the author. He praises Dostoevsky’s novels for their freely allowing such contradictory views to co-exist. (Bellow 1965:211) Bakhtin seems to agree with the aforementioned views of prose fiction. From a linguistic point of view, he also regards Dostoevsky as “the creator of polyphonic novel”(Bakhtin 1984:7). He argues that Dostoevsky’s characters are “not voiceless slaves” but “free” people, capable of standing alongside their creator, capable of not agreeing with him. And even of rebelling against him”(Bakhtin 1984:6). In his works voice and consciousness are independent and never absorbed into the absolute, authorial voice. So Bakhtin draws a distinction between “monologic” and “polyphonic” literary works. The former are dominated by the author’s single voice and one-sided view. In this type of novel, the author likes and dislikes, and sympathies and ironies toward particular characters, may be evident to readers. The latter type is the “ideal” works where multiple views are allowed to exist. 4.1 Polyphony in the Epigraph The Waste Land opens with the words of Trimalchio boasting that he has seen the Sibyl at Cumae, who asked the gods to grant her eternal life but forgot to ask for eternal youth . "NAM sibyllam quidem Cuimis egō ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere，et cum illi pueri dicerent： Σιβνλλατιθελειζ; repondebat illa： áπóθαν εινθελ ω." Trimalchio quotes Sybil telling to the boys that her only wish is to die. It can be

observed that the Sybil’s words are in a first person reported from a third person; and the third person Trimalchio, is himself being quoted by Encopius , himself the fiction narrator of the Satyricon. Thus, the direct speech is at least four times transformed here: the Sibyl to the boys; Trimalchio to Encopius, Trimalchio to the guests; and Petronius to Eliot. Furthrtmore, the words Trimalchio said is in Latin, and is reported by Petronius in Greek and about two thousands years later was introduced to the audience who speak English, and we know English is partly derived from Latin and ancient Greek. Hence ,we hear multi-voices or dialogue between the two writers evoked in several languages, and both Petronius’s Trimalchio and the sybil at Cumae are estranged, parodied and included in the lines of Eliot’s The Waste Land (Blevins, 2008: 187) . 4.2 Polyphony in “The Burial of the Dead” 4.2.1 Past voice, present voice and future voice Accoring to Bakhtin’s polyphony theory , language is “populated or overpopulated with the intentions of others’ (Bakhtin,1981:294). Every utterance exists by reflecting other utterances, whether they are past or future. The current utterance is countered against the past one and is , in turn, targeted against the future responses. The first line, “April is the cruelest month” has implicit reference to or an apparent contradiction to famous Chaucerian glorification of April with its sweet showers at the beginning of Canterbury Tales. The characters of Chaucer’s poem are setting out on a pilgrimage in search of a martyr who gives life meaning. By alluding to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Eliot is using the motive of pilgrimage as spiritual quest and salvation in a continuing dialogue with one of the greatest English poets, Chaucer. To Eliot, the modern society is a kind of waste land; therefore, he parodies the motif of reviving of the earth, roots and flowers, opposing drought and fog to rain and reviving nature. Hence, in this short line we can not only hear the voice of past in Chaucer’s time, but also can hear the present voice in modern society uttered by Eliot. Besides, the past voice and the present voice are heard by the constantly changing of tenses. Tense is a grammatical category that locates a situation in time, which indicates when the situation takes place. Tense places temporal references along a conceptual timeline. In the first line “APRIL is the cruelest month,” is present tense,

then shifts into the past tense in the fifth line “Winter kept us warm covering / Earth in forgetful snow”. Then the tense changes again into the present tense in the beginning of the second episode “What are the roots that clutch / what branches grow … (lines19)” continuously, it shifts to the future tense “And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”(lines 27-30) Again changed into past tense in the 35th line “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago” In the third episode, multiple time shifts are implied in the section, which help us to hear both the voice of the past and the voice of the present, even the voice of future. Madame Sosostris in this poem is an astrologer who can tell future. A fortune, a prediction of the future, is told in the poem’s present by a woman who suggests both the Greek past (Petronius) and the Egyptian past (Tarot cards) and who uses an Elizabethan reference (The Tempest). The future voice is foretold in the present tense employing a vehicle, the tarot cards, which belongs to the past. (Kaplan, 1993: 33) Only judging by the reverse of time tenses can we hear the polyphony of the past, present ,even future voices. In addition, in the last episode of this section “There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!’ You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!” (lines 68-70) Steston is the name associated with the twentieth century .It clearly recalls the trade name of a hat. It is the voice from present time. But Eliot’s line “Steston … in the ships at Mylae” represents the voice of the past. Mylae is a place where the battle of the Punic Wars (260 B.C) took place. The war was fought between Romans and Carthaginians. Obviously, Steston is everyone from ancient time to modern time, including Eliot himself. Therefore the names “Steston” within these two lines enables us to hear the plural voices from presen , past and future.

4.2.2 Character’s voice and the poet’s voice According to Bakhtin’s polyphony theory, characters are represented not as

objects who are manipulated and commented upon by an omniscient narrator, but as subjects, on an equal footing with narrator, and the narrator does not have precedence over the character but has equal right to speak.(Vice,1997:114) In The Waste Land, there can never be an omniscient narrator. Eliot used fragmentation in his poetry both to demonstrate the chaotic state of modern existence and to juxtapose literary texts with one another. He applies bits and pieces of dialogue, images, scholarly ideas, foreign words, formal styles, and tones within this poem. In “The Burial of the Dead”, the protagonists include Countess Marie, hyacinth girl, Madame Sosostris. Eliot provides dialogue for them respectively to express their own voices, either with or without quotation marks. Eliot, the narrator is invisible behind the scene, it is the characters that are free to view their opinions and express their feelings. However, we can never deny the existence of Eliot’s voice, which is parallel with the character’s voice; only in the last episode can we directly discover the poet’s voice: Flowed up the hill and down King William Street, To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine. There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying ‘Stetson!’(lines 66-69) The scenes of King William Street and the moment the sound on the final stroke of nine are the real description of Eliot’s daily life. “Stetson” is Eliot’s voice generally refers to someone he knew in his life. But Stetson also can be regarded as a character throughout the poem and uttered his own voice. Therefore, the poet’s voice and the character’s voice are not only equal but also intertwined with each other. Besides, as is mentioned above, the absence of quotation marks of the character may generate the chaotic quality of the poem, for instance , the absence of quotation marks of the countess Marie’s cousin’s words, Marie, hold on tight. And down we went. In the mountains, there you feel free.(lines 16-17) Then, Madame Sosostris’ words are also without quotation marks, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks (lines 46-49) Without quotation marks, we can hardly recognize whether the voice belong to the poet or the characters. These lines can be understood as the mixture or multi-voice which includes juxtaposition of both poet’s voice and characters’ voices, which are independent and never absorbed into the absolute voice, therefore break the former author-God feature of monophony. Therefore, the plurality of poet’s voices and characters’ voices clearly revealthe democratic feature of polyphony. 4.2.3 Oracular voices and individual voices In the first episode, the first impression of the opening lines of “The Burial of the Dead” are narrated in the third person, which sounds impersonal, tending to be oracular. The opening part lines make a universal statement about The Waste Land, and then are shifted into choral voices within The Waste Land, and are continuously changed into an individual voice clearly identified as that of Marie. After a brief introductory lyric, we encounter “us” in the eighth line and “we” in the ninth line, while the first person plural, in its turn, is replaced by the first person singular- in German. Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.(lines13) As a result of inserting the words of Countess Marie Larish, Eliot shifts the impersonal voices to individual voices. Then, the second episode, the personal voices of countess and his cousin is again dissolved into prophetic voices. What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images (lines19-22) The manner of these lines is plainly oracular and prophetic. Eliot’s notes refer to Ezwkiel and Ecclesites to elucidate the opening of the second episode. In Ezekiel 2:1 it is God who says to the prophet “son of man”, therefore, the starting lines of the second episode is take on the voice of God ,which is a oracular one. (Reeves,1994: 39)But continuously, the voice has altered to a personal one, which uttered by hyacinth girl: “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; 'They called me the hyacinth girl.”(lines 35-36) Followed by Madame Sosostris’ personal voice in the third episode , the tone of the voices turned again into an oracular one by citing Dante’s Inferno “I had not thought death had undone so many.” (Canto XXVI, lines 117)

In this part oracular voice and individual voice intertwine with each other. As we know, the oracular voice is a kind of authorial voice, and shouldn’t be set equally with the individual voice in one context. But in The Waste Land these two types of voices are equally settled, and from time to time, respond to each other. Therefore, the individual voice owns the power of subversion, and is free to seek its own meaning without the restraint of the oracular voice 4.3 Polyphony in “A Game of Chess” 4.3.1 Mythic voice and realistic voice According to Eliot’s sense of history, history acquires the mythical character of permanently repeated archetypes and vice versa, myth becomes real myth, therefore, becomes an instrument for searching reality. Myth is not limited either to “the things that are spoken in ritual acts” as was understood in Greece, or to retelling of mythological plots and images, or even symbol and archetype. The myth should not be limited only to anthropological studies of dying and reviving gods, to “anthropological studies of vegetation myths” (Blevins,2008: 186). It should be used as a way of poetic thinking that enables one to reveal in the symbol and the archetype approach toward being, and to show a perspective of time and space in which entire picture of the world of beginning is evoked. In this section, Eliot alludes to series of myths of the past, as Eliot says in his note, “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L.Weston’s book on Grail Legend: From Ritual to Romance…To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly, I mean The golden Bough, I have used especially two volumes of Adonis, Attis, Osiris…the poem certain reference to vegetation memories.”（Drew,1949: 49） In this section, nearly all the protagonists are rulers deprived of their kingdoms such as the Fisher King alluded to in Grail Legend. The men and women populated this episode are in effect deposed kings and queens. Dido, Aneas, and Marc Antony are all exiled yearning to strike new roots. Together with the hyacinith girl, who has been exiled from homeland, momentarily glimpsed in the Hyacinth Garden. And by the

fragment of Ariel’s song from The Tempest “who are pearls that were his eyes”(Skakespeare,2001:314), when hearing that tune ,the shipwrecked Ferdinand thinks his father dead and believes himself exiled in an alien land, becoming a king deprived by his rightful inherence. As Eliot’s effort to juxtapose all the protagonists who resemble the fate of the disabled Fisher King in his waste land aims to project the social reality by means of analogy to the mythic past. The whole Europe after the First World War was in chaos, the disability of leadership and the condition of anarchy made the residents feel rootless, like an alien people who were lacking in spiritual faith and consciousness. The modern society is like the waste land alluded to in the Grail Legend. Everyone in this “unreal” city is similar to a king or queen who has lost their kingdom. Hence, the mythic voice projects the will of the realistic voices of modern world in Eliot’s lines. Obviously, it is high time for the modern England to restore their kingdom which echoes the voice of the mythic legend. Eliot’s mythological imagination is a bridge joining contemporary times and ancient times; therefore plural voices can be heard as a polyphony feature of this section. 4.3.2 Feminine voices and masculine voices Before the woman actually speaks, we have already heard many feminine voices—of myth and of the past, as well as of implied literary characters from Cleopatra to Imogene to Bianca raped by the duke in Middleton’s Women Beaware Women, then followed by hysterical women’s insistent questioning and the pub lady’s vivid chatter. All the feminine voices suggest the continuation of desire. But the desire is also particularly tragic for the women of this section, from the allusion of Cleopatra, Dido,and Ohelia, and the rape of Phelomela, to the loneliness of the nervous woman and the sad domestic life of Lil.(Moody,1994: 129) And each feminine voice also combines with the masculine voices, according to the allusion in this section, we can perceive Dante’s neglect of memory of Beatrice after her death; the year’s sojourn of Ulysses and Circe; the year that Aneas spends with Dido;

Marx Antony’s desertion of wife and country and remain with Cleopatra in Egypt

(Blistein, 2008: 157). All the mythic allusions exemplify the heroes who turn from pure

love to impure love, and are unfaithful to the memory of the dead or distant woman who rightfully claims his affection. In each instance, the heroes’ return to homeland is delayed or prevented because of the improper desire. In addition, there are also the married duke who raped Bianca and also King Tereus who betrayed his wife and raped Philomela. Hence, the polyphony of the masculine voices and feminine voices are clearly heard between the lines. Though the women’s voice sounds in danger or related with death, for instance Ophelia’s word before suicide“Good night, ladies, good night, sweet ladies, good night,good night.”(Hamlet, Act IV. Scene V.lines:42-43) The narrator holds the view that women are responsible for their own present danger. For instance , he regards Belladonna’s perfumes, jewels and cosmetics, her hair, shining in the firelight ,as lures which she hopes to draw him to her, induce him to participate in the fatal, sensual feast ,cause his “death by water”, for Belladonna not only means beauty but also a poisonous flower. Therefore, the narrator, owning a masculine voice has a love-hate relationship with the women. He loves the beauty but hates to be estranged by her. The uneasy love-hate relationship also projects Eliot’s personal life; the hysterical women’s voice is compared to Eliot’s wife Vivien, who suffer from severe nerve problems. “What is that noise?” The wind under the door. “What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” Nothing again nothing. “Do “You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?” I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. “Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”( lines 117-126) According to Bakhtin, within the plurality of voices, there are dominant voices, using their power to silence others. Absolute meaning is found in silence as unuttered truth. Freedom is found after breaking the identification of the absolute truth. Within this process of de-identification, people can use liberating or subversive strategies, such as laughter and transformation.

In this section, as John Lennard has pointed out, “Eliot’s speaking pictures of Philomel probably owes something to Purgatorio X, where a series of stories, including that of Philomel, are enabled by God to narrate the story they depict.” （Lennard,2005: 123）Thus, Philomel’s inviolable voice is made to speak out the tragic and profaned past voice into the empty and guilt present(Kaplan,1993: 55). The change of Philomel, by the barbarous king So rudely forced; yet there the nightingale Filled all the desert with inviolable voice And still she cried, and still the world pursues, 'Jug Jug' to dirty ears. (lines 100-103) The violated woman Philomel, tongue cut off, unable to put her story into words, nevertheless expresses her grief in inviolable song, in the simple sound “Jug Jug” . In this section, masculine voice is a dominate one, while feminine voice is subversive. Those tragic women either been raped or discarded seek revenge by seducing or spiritually torturing the unfaithful man, which challenge the authority of the absolute voice of man. Or they even use silence to rebel against the dominant power of the men. The plurality of feminine voices and masculine voices represents women’s strong will to break the authority of man and seek an equal right with the man. 4.3.3 Inviolable voice and profaned voice Bakhtin’s polyphony theory also pays attention to the communication or dialogue between the writer and reader. In the polyphonic works , the reader, too, participates in the dialogue (Morson and Emerson,1990:247). Indeed the reader must participate since the dialogic interaction "provides no support for the viewer who would objectify an entire event according to some ordinary monologic category (thematically, lyrically or cognitively)—and this consequently makes the viewer also a participant" (Bakhtin, 1984: 18). In this section, the inviolability of voice is in the ear of the listener. “Jug Jug” can sound like sound without meaning, nonsense syllables; or in Elizabethan poetry it can be a way of representing bird-song. Or else, it refers to a crude joking reference to sexual intercourse. Therefore, it is due to the listener to decide how to hear or take the meaning of word “Jug Jug”, therefore, we are trapped in the polyphony of inviolable

voice and profaned voice. Although after the transformation of Philomel, she is pure, and her voice is inviolable. Although she can not be violated further, even so she goes on crying grievously; and yet, in spite of the grievous story of Philomel, the world continues even now to pursue her. “‘Jug Jug’ to dirty ears” (lines 103) mix the pure notation of birdsong and the lustful notation of sexual slang. Philomel’s cry does not sound grievously to those who want to hear differently. The innocence of the ‘cried’ cries out even as it continues to be profaned, to be transformed in the ears of ‘dirty’ words in pursuit. According to Bakhtin’s philosophy of self and other, every person is influenced by others and consequently no voice can be regarded as isolated. The self is coauthored with others. (Wang, 2004: 43) In this part, polyphony happens within the self and invites the reader to enter into the dialogue to release the authority of the author and create a more free and democratic context between the writer and his implied readers. Therefore, the nature of the voice whether it is inviolable or profaned depends on the disposition of the hearer—which is said in previous section ‘Hypocrite lecteur.’ But actually, not all the readers are hypocritical, hence the interweaving of the inviolable voice and profaned voice are heard, which adds to the indefinite understanding by applying this polyphony or plurality method.

4.4 Polyphony in “The Fire Sermon”

4.4.1 Serious voice and ironical voice The opening lines of “The Fire Sermon” are somewhat a kind of ironic chuckle. “The river’s tend is broken” suggests “solemn overtones of meaning”, and in the Old Testament, the tent is the place of worship. (Reeves, 1994: 67)Here the broken tent and the allusion of the holy tent are a typical example of polyphony. Then, it is noticed that, in Edmund Spenser’s Prothalamion, the nymph’s song calls “love complement”, which means a marriage is a serious human ritual. While the following words suggested the sexual violation, “the last fingers of leaf / Clutch and sink into the wet bank.

(lines174-175)” In addition, the line “By the waters of Leman I sat down and wept...” (line 182) is seemingly serious and solemn, but the trailing dots give us pause to recall that a leman is also a mistress or a prostitute. Therefore, the serious and the ironic voices coexist here. Besides, “Sweet Thames / run softly till I end my song” refers to the refrain to the Prothalamion by Edmund Spenser, a poem in honor of the double marriage of the two honorable and virtuous ladies, the Ladie Elizabeth, and the Ladie Katherine Somerset, daughters to the right honorable the Earl of Worcester, and married the two worthy gentleman M.Henry Gilford and M.William Esquyers. The tone of Spenser’s poem is serious and honorable. (Reeves, 1994: 63) Here, Spenser’s poem has been ionized, the nymphs in Spenser’s are in pastoral vision of sweet voice, whereas the vision of “The Fire Sermon” is a morbid one of sexual violation, empty and disharmony; Eliot’s nymphs have been compromised by the company and the context they keep. Yet, when Eliot first quotes the line by Spenser (line 176), there is a polyphony feature of serious voice and the ironical voice. Indeed, in its new context, Spenser’s line possesses an extraordinary ironic voice not present in “Prothalamion”, where it has the more beautiful form of a repeated refrain. Here, Eliot wants to represent the sharp contrast between the Spenser’s context and the nowadays modern life, which is at a loss of faith and serious love. Then towards the end of the first paragraph of “The Fire Sermon”, Eliot continues to play around with Spenser’s line, breaking its serious voices, but in doing so, he also puts an end to his own ironic voice Sweet Thames, run softly till I end my song, Sweet Thames, run softly, for I speak not loud or long.” Besides, between the line, O the moon shone bright on Mrs. Porter And on her daughter They wash their feet in soda water Et, O ces voix d'enfants, chantant dans la coupole! (lines 196-202) The last sentence comes from the Verlaine’s sonnet Parsifal, which mainly describes the spiritual uplift experiences after Parsifal’s religious quest. In the Grail Legend, there is a choir of children singing at the ceremony of the foot-washing before the restoration of the wounded Fisher king with the help of the knight Parcifal. (Palmer,

1996: 20) And this ceremony is aimed to remove the curse from the waste land, therefore, the song of the children is serious and holy, which forecasts the refreshing of the waste land. Whereas in Eliot’s waste land, there is also a foot- wash image, which is related to the Australian ballad about Mrs. Porter the brothel keeper and her daughter the prostitute. The voice of the two women is a dirty version in contrast to Verlaine’s serious one. Hence, Verlaine’s serious voice is parallel to the Eliot’s ironical voices. Eliot’s waste land is still cursed, because the land is full of guilty and improper love. In addition, lines 116-225 “Out of the window perilously spread / Her drying combinations touched by the sun's last rays,” refers to Olivia, heroine of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield. She grieves for her seduction, with a sense of hopelessness, regret and even seeks to die. Though Olivia is a wronged woman, she embraces a sentimental melancholy and feels shameful of herself. Her voice is serious with conscious. “When lovely woman stoops to folly, And finds too late that men betray, What charm can sooth her melancholy, What art can wash her guilt away?

The only art her guilt to cover, To hide her shame from every eye, To give repentance to her lover, And wring his bosom -- is to die.” (W. Eliot, 2004: 517) Whereas the woman in Eliot’s lines, after being seduced, “She smoothes her hair with automatic hand/ And puts a record on the gramophone.”(lines 255-256) without showing any melancholy or hopelessness, continues to do some stifle, without any sense of shame. The polyphony of serious voices of Goldsmith’s Olivia and the ironical voice of the woman in The Waste Land is clearly revealed in this part. Here, Eliot uses the polyphony feature to scorn for the modern heroine’s spiritual emptiness which projects the emptiness of the meaningless human world. And by memorizing Spenser’s pastoral vision and the nymphs’ sweet voice, Eliot aims to evoke the modern people to regain the lost faith. 4.4.2 Aged voices and youthful voices As we know, the motif of The Waste Land is obviously youth, who is taken away

from the context of the poem’s aged speakers and observers. The world of Eliot’s poem, in which both what is remembered in the past and what is seen in present， is dominated by youth. The nature and the function of the aged voice is that the poet creates a mythical speaker who, by virtue of his wisdom and his age, can comment authoritatively on the present unfortunate drift of society. In The Waste Land, the age of the speaker is neither made explicit nor even very obviously implied. Nevertheless, there is sufficient evidence to conclude that the speaker is old. The evidence for the speaker’s age can be found in its specific allusions and links. In the opening fourteen lines of “The Fire Sermon”, the speaker repeats variations of Spenser’s line “Sweete Thammes runne softly / till I end my song” three times. The allusion partly provides a contrast between the weddings that Spenser celebrates in Prothalamion and the illicit affairs of Eliot’s nymphs and city heirs, and partly reflects upon the situation of the speaker. Spenser begins his poem on a calm day. When I whom sullein care, Though discontent of my long fruitlesse stay In Princes Court, and expectation vayne Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away, Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne, Walkt forth to ease my payne (Spenser, 2004: 157) The lines set Spenser’s own condition and depressing mood against the happiness of his vision for most of the rest of the poem, and the phrase “long fruitlesse stay” suggests he has grown old. The melancholy note is sustained in the supplication of the refrain for softness, and there is even the elegiac implication that the end of his song might be the end of his singing, which is an aged voice. Coincidently, Spenser’s situation is similar to Eliot’s. Like Spenser, he presents himself walking by the Thames in melancholy mood; he is a modern man, a relative youth and his melancholy takes on an aged voice from his use of Spenser’s line. The second paragraph of “The Fire Sermon” is equally revealing. According to Jessie Weston, the Fisher King is a drowned god, named Tammuz or Adonis. The speaker’s fishing links him with the aged Fisher King. Besides, Eliot’s youth fisher has some relation to Phlebas the Phoenician. Since Phlebas passes in death “the stages of

his age and youth (lines 317)”, he must have died old; therefore the youth voice is combined with the aged voice which is a typical feature of polyphony. Another point is that Eliot alludes to Ferdinand in The Tempest: “Musing upon the king my brother’s wreck”. Whatever this means exactly, it clearly makes the speaker a contemporary (“my brother”) of Alonso, Ferdinand’s wrecked father, rather than Ferdinand himself. Here, the polyphony of youth voice and aged voice are intertwined, making the line highly puzzling. Besides those points I have discussed above in this part, Eliot applies a typical figure Tiresias and uses his aged voice to condemn the youthful world around him. Tiresias’ watching of the clerk and typist provides the exemplified evidence of Polyphony of aged voice and youthful voices. As for Eliot’s famous notes about Tiresias: Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character”, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as one-eyed merchant, seller of currents, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem (Harold Bloom, 1986: 241). Historically, he is connected with the story of King Oedipus of Thebes, which is the classical legend of the waste land, with striking resemblance to the drought kingdom of Mediaeval Fisher King where the sins hang over. In this poem, Tiresias serves to universalize its central significance by bringing home to us the outrageousness of the sin involved in the violation of the sanctity of sex and the necessity of purifying the sinner’s soul through suffering as an only way to salvation. (Rai, 1970:75) Oedipus unwittingly kills his father and marries his own mother and thus cursed by of the gods in the form of a deadly plague, epidemic and destructive, which neither king nor common residents fail to regard as a curse for some dark and hidden crime. Tiresias, the blind prophet, is summoned and compelled by the king’s pride to tell the shocking truth that he himself is the root of the plague. After the king slowly realizes the horrible truth, nothing remains for the king but the duty of self-exile which eventually generates spiritual calm and inner illumination.

Tiresias is an aged seer, he has done everything, knows it all. He has passed through youthful folly, reached the mature. He consequently can make a judgment on the futile affair of the clerk and the typist, a couple making rather careless “love”, as if the sex act were a duty or an obligation, like eating or sleeping, rather than intimate sharing of an pleasurable procreative energy with each other (Richardson, 1992: 64-65).

In Eliot’s The Waste Land, Tiresias’ aged voice also foretells the destiny of the modern waste land that is without proper and procreative love, the world of youth will be in a weary and hopeless mass and the youth has to realize the root of the lack of energy in the waste land. Therefore, the aged voices embrace a subversive power, which is aimed to break the meaningless world where haunted the voices of youngsters. 4.4.3 Buddhism and Christianity The title “The Fire Sermon” is a direct reference to a sermon, a teaching text from the Buddha, and as such The Buddha’s “Fire Sermon” emphasizes a spiritual lesson by means of the figure that all of the universe is on fire—burning, or changing—even as the soul witnesses it. The Buddha uses this figure to teach the lesson that the created world of time and space, which for the sensory, sensual self seems to be the only substantial reality, but in fact is only an illusion. Therefore, it can deceive individual person into imaging that what is “real” in this world, with wealth, fame, power, and the “real” things， also includes some other attachments in the world , including the flesh and its pleasures and the pleasures of sexual love.(Murphy, 2007: 457) This world, however, is in fact illusory, according to Buddha’s teaching, for the simple reason that it is always changing. Hence, nothing in it endures, whereas the soul does. So, then, the soul must seek the sources of its peace elsewhere. In the note, Eliot compares Christ sermon with the Buddha sermon. With its persuasion to store one’s treasure in heaven, where it cannot rust, Christ’s guidance to his followers is based on the same principle as The Buddha’s: The world that the senses perceive to be the only world is instead a place of corruption, where nothing, not even thought or belief or love lasts long, it is built on nothing more than the shifting sands of human knowledge and human interaction. (Murphy, 2007: 614)Therefore, the shifting scene that the speaker discovers as he wanders in the riverside at early morning is the

one that emphasizes that no human pleasure endures. Just like the nymph, who is a imagined person , and the city directors and their heirs, who come and go as changing winds. Lovers, too, are all the soon departed or parted. All the sensational love is unreal. At the line 292, the three Thames-daughters sing their song separately, each tells her pitiful story. The whole scene is an echo of Dante’s La Pia . Each of the singers treats her loss of chastity as inevitable and as bound up with the very soil of the waste land. (Kaplan, 1965: 42)Everything is meaningless, purposeless, unrelated, a part of the negation of life itself. The mood of the Thames-daughters’ song is shattered by the introduction of the words St. Augustine, “To Carthage then I came/ Burning burning burning burning.(lines 308-309)” According to Eliot’s note, in Carthage, Augustine heard “a cauldron of unholy loves” singing in his ears. But Carthage is the home of Dido, evoke in the first part of section two. The unholy loves that Augustine heard were burning. The section ends with works from the “Fire Sermon” immediately followed by another quotation from Augustine(Kaplan, 1965: 43). “O Lord Thou pluckest me out O Lord Thou pluckest Burning” (lines309-311) The polyphony of what Eliot calls “these two representatives of eastern and western asceticism” at the end of the “Fire Sermon” serves to heighten the disparity between the “burning” of all things and the coldness and emptiness of the modern. The story of the Thames-daughters contains no burning, no passion. The fire is put out by the complete indifference to the body and the spirit. Both Buddha and the Christ teach that moral virtue is the means of achieving the supreme object of life, the eternal and timeless salvation of the individual soul. Christ seeks salvation in a blissful eternity while Buddha seeks it in a final release from suffering through annihilation, and both conceive fire as a symbol for the destructive element in life(Kaplan, 1965: 43).. In this section, Eliot parallels Buddhism and Christianity, The plurality of religions means that Eliot is in simultaneous contact with voices from both their own religious tradition and other systems of religion. The polyphony of Buddhism and Christianity is an intercultural dialogue between different ideas and beliefs from diverse

traditions, which shows Eliot’s inclusive attitudes towards different religions. By offering a glimpse into a culture system and tradition of Buddhism, which is new to us. Consequently, the voices from different traditions embrace a subversive power to break the already established thought-set, providing a new vision to save the modern waste land spiritually.

4.5 Polyphony in “What the Thunder Said” 4.5.1 Religion and society The initial imagery associated with the apocalypse at this section’s opening is taken from the crucifixion of Christ. According to Eliot’s note, one of its themes is the journey to Emmaus when the risen Christ anonymously joined with several of his disciples, seeking to know, why they were so low in spirit. They shared with him as best as they could, then he revealed himself to them as Christ, and helps them conquer the horror of crucifixion. But in The Waste Land, Christ is not resurrected here: we are told, “He who was living is now dead (lines 328) .” In the rest of the first part, Eliot combines the reference to contemporary social events in Eastern Europe and other more traditional apocalypse narratives, continues to draw on biblical imagery and symbolism associated with the quest for the Holy Grail, which is the Polyphony of social and religion. In this part Eliot identifies the “present decay of Eastern Europe” as another theme, which is with social consideration. Eliot’s citation originally come from German novelist Hermann Hesse’s Blick ins Chaos, in which Hesse laments that same decline, recalling an image of the drunken laughter of Dmitri Karamazov, the hero of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. Whatever else Hesse might have in mind, Eliot surely would have in mind the chaos brought about by the socialist and communist revolutions that had brought down the Russian czar in 1917 and were wreaking destruction on that nation’s people. No wonder sounds of maternal lamentation fill the air and call to mind. Then the lines: And no rock If there were rock And also water And water A spring

A pool among the rock If there were the sound of water only Not the cicada And dry grass singing But sound of water over a rock Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop But there is no water （lines345-358） The repetitive language and harsh imagery of this section suggest that the end is perhaps near, that not only will there be no renewal but that there will be no survival either, with both consideration of social reality and religion event. Cities are destroyed, rebuilt, and destroyed, mirroring the cyclical downfall of religion cultures: Jerusalem, Greece, Egypt, and Austria—among the major empires of the past two millennia—all see their capitals fall. Here, Eliot applies the polyphony to show the plurality of social and religion by using religion downfall to project decadence of modern social reality. Only by hearing the tenet of what the thunder said can the modern generation regain their moral faith and belief. It is obviously that the voice of religion is with the subversive power, which implied between the lines. It aims to save the spiritual waste land especially after being destroyed by the First World War and social immorality.

4.5.2 Polyphonic “DA” in fable of Upanishad By being located in India , though the Ganga is sunken ,that is, the water level is down, it has not yet dried up, and the help needed to restore it to its full flow—the healing rain—is on the way, announced by the thunder. Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves Waited for rain, while the black clouds Gathered far distant, over Himavant. The jungle crouched, humped in silence. Then spoke the thunder (lines 395- 398) Replacing the dry, sterile thunder that echoes earlier in the poem, this thunder not only brings rain but will speak primal truths, which is the typical feature of polyphony. Eliot’s notes tell us that the words the thunder speaks come from a fable in the Upanishads, a vast collection of Hindu wisdom literature intended to tell secret truths, through fables and parables.

The story , according to Eliot’s original source, is intended to teach the three principle virtues, and it goes like this : The three orders of being- the gods, humans, and

demons—having observed self-restraint, approached Brahma, the Creator, to seek instruction in how they ought to behave if they wished to be virtuous. To each, Brahma tells a single word: “DA”. Each group understood what Brahma says to them perfectly, although each heard the instruction differently. That is to say, the word of DA is polyphonic.

The gods or celestials, who live in paradise, never grow old, and know only pleasure. They need to practice restraint, so when Brahma uttered “DA” to them, they hear him saying “Damyata”, which means to restrain or control. In other words, they need to practice subduing their senses if they wish to be virtuous.

Humans, who are forced to spend an excessive amount of time and energy acquiring things—food, shelter, clothing—are liable to become too greedy and selfish, getting everything for themselves at the expense of their neighbors. In Brahma’s “Da”, they heard him saying, “Datta”—give, be charitable, because practicing the virtue of charity is the only way to overcome the greediness and selfishness.

Finally, the demon, who can be very cruel and always like hurting others with insults and injury, heard Brahma say “Dayadhvam,” which means to be merciful or compassionate.

The polyphony of the word DA, in each case, the instruction requires the receiver to overcome his or her own worst nature. 4.5.3 Polyphonic “DA” in The Waste Land Eliot adapts this fable to fit the needs of his own thematic and narrative aims. The meditations upon the Upanishads give Eliot a chance to test the potential of the modern world. DA Datta: what have we given? My friend, blood shaking my heart The awful daring of a moment's surrender Which an age of prudence can never retract By this, and this only, we have existed

Which is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms (lines 400-409)

Datta ,give, is the first instruction that Eliot’s speakers hear, and he is asking, “what have we given?” he finds that the only time people give is in the sexual act and that this gift is ultimately destructive: He associates it with spider webs and solicitors reading wills.

D A I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus (lines 410-415)

The second instruction: Dayadhvam, just as the poem’s speaker fails to find signs of giving, so too does he search in vain for acts of sympathy—the second characteristic of “what the thunder says”: He recalls individuals so caught up in his or her own fate—each thinking only of the key to his or her own prison—as to be oblivious to anything but “ethereal rumors” of others.

D A Damyata: The boat responded Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar The sea was calm, your heart would have responded Gaily, when invited, beating obedient To controlling hands (lines417-421)

The third instruction Damyata expressed in the thunder’s speech—that of control—holds the most potential, although it implies a series of domineering relationships and surrenders of the self that, ultimately, are never realized.

Therefore, it is obviously that the word DA not only embraces the polyphonic meaning in the fable of Upanishad , which means control ,give ,compassionate, but the word DA gains its plural meanings after being cited by Eliot. By delivering these moral virtues through one simple word “DA”, Eliot tries to inject the moral virtues and faith

into the wasteland. The word DA with a subversive power aims to breakdown the immorality and villainy of the modern society.

Chapter5 THE SOCIAL SIGNIFICANCE OF POLYPHONY IN THE WASTE LAND

5.1Similar social reason of emergence of polyphony and Eliot’s The Waste Land The emergence of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Bakhtin’s polyphony theory are both in unrest society, which is full of wars, disorders and poverties. The Waste Land, born in a chaotic time gave a picture of spiritual ruins in Europe shortly after the end of the First World War and expressed the disillusionment of a generation of intellectuals. He challenged the society by voicing a new style of modernist poetry which involves multi-voices. Eliot felt that the modern world presents an immense scene of futility and emptiness. By contrasting negative qualities of modern world with the positive ones with the past, this poem shocked the reader into recognition of the dismal truth about modern life. The disability of the fisher King made his kingdom a waste land, so was the disability of the British leadership made the U.K the waste land. The prevailing discourse of society res restless, lack of energy . Consequently, he wrote The Waste Land to rebel against the modern society. Eliot is a liberal poet, who releases multiplex voices from the restraint of the dispirited official voice.

Similarly, exiled for six years, Bakhtin put forward a theory of polyphony in the time of turmoil, which was aimed to subvert the monologic point of view of “official” thought, language and culture. To a certain extent, the polyphony theory was a reaction against the hegemony of absolute authorial control. Bakhtin was also a liberal, because the concepts of polyphony proclaimed the rights of the individual against society and the rights of individual voice, speech, or discourse against collective discourse, whether the collective discourse was the official discourse. Therefore, the concept of polyphony was not only the product of Baktin’s insightful thought, but also closely related to subverting the turbulent society. 5.2 Social value of polyphony theory applied in The Waste Land

By analyzing The Waste Land from Bakhtin’s polyphony theory, it is discovered

that unlike most previous poetry, which uses one style or voice, and is therefore distinctively monologic , The Waste Land is characterized by what Bakhtin refers to as polyphony. The Waste Land contains multiple genres and forms of speech: pub conversation, autobiographies of the aristocracy, Wagner and nursery rhymes, the Upanishads and the Bible, commerce and Dante. Therefore the listeners are able to hear the social diversity of different speech types. Bakhtin says the novel is a “struggle among socio-linguistic points of view” but the same apply to Eliot’s The Waste Land. Far from being a condemnation of social disorder, The Waste Land is a mosaic social discourses and ideological viewpoints (Childs, 1999: 81). The Waste Land, born in a chaotic time, gave a picture of spiritual ruins in Europe shortly after the end of the First World War and expresses the disillusionment of a generation of intellectuals. Eliot challenges the society by voicing a new style of modernist poetry which involves multi-voice. Eliot feels that the modern world presents an immense scene of futility and emptiness. By contrasting negative qualities of modern world with the positive ones with the past, this poem shocks the reader into recognition of the dismal truth about modern life. The disability of the Fisher King makes his kingdom a waste land, so is the disability of the British leadership makes the U.K the waste land. The prevailing discourse of society is restless, lack of energy. Consequently, he writes The Waste Land to rebel against the modern society. Eliot is a liberal poet, who releases plural voices from the restraint of the dispirited official voice. Besides, the poem is also full of parody and double meaning. In a great deal of the text Eliot says one thing and implies another. The Waste Land opens itself to multiple readings and even seems to encourage a plurality of interpretation. The polyphonic approach encourages the reader to see social diversity, hybridity and irony in the poem. The dominant images and scenes of The Waste Land appear ugly, brutal and unfeeling; they are moments of deterioration, danger, and mental decay, portraying a desensitized, routine life surrounded by debris and pollution. The poem suggests a world-weary civilization of the First World War. According to Eliot, the modern society is waiting to die in order to find its rebirth and redemption. The multi-voice feature is the power of subverting the restless and futile society and restores

the glory of human civilization.

Chapter Six CONCLUSION

Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony is always used by scholars to interpret novel, but it is still fit for analyzing a poem. This paper aims to analyze T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land from perspective of Bakhtin’s polyphony theory. The poem The Waste Land totally breaks up with the previous literary trend. In reading this difficult poem, the author of this thesis find there are multi- voices in The Waste Land, which is quite in accordance with Bakhtin’s polyphony theory. Polyphony includes a diversity of points of view and voices. One of the most known examples of polyphony is Dostoevsky's prose. Bakhtin has characterized Dostoevsky's work as polyphonic: unlike other novelists, he does not appear to aim for a single vision, going beyond simply describing situations from various angles. So is what I find in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land ,there exist a polyphony features in almost each part of “ The waste Land”. It is discovered that there are multiple voices implied in The Waste Land ,such as oracular voice and individual voice ; past voice and present voice; character’s voice and Poet’s voices; mythic voice and realistic voice; feminine voice and masculine voice; inviolable voices and profaned voice; serious voice and ironical voices; aged voices and youthful voice. By analyzing The Waste Land from Bakhin’s polyphony theory, many hidden voices between the lines are released from the dominate power, each voice is equal and free to express their own viewpoints which added the democratic feature of The Waste Land. Through the detailed analysis of the polyphonical features in the poem, the author of this thesis concludes that the polyphony in The Waste Land breaks the monologue of official discourse by emphasizing the importance of multi-voice, thus, different subversive voices are revealed. The polyphonic approach encourages the reader to see social diversity, hybridity and irony in the poem. The poem suggests a world-weary civilization of the First World War. According to Eliot, the modern society is waiting to die in order to find its rebirth and redemption. The multi-voices feature owns the

subversive power, which is good for us to realize the democratic social ideality and restore the glory of human kingdom.

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Appendix Ⅰ

攻读研究生期间发表的论文

1. 王梦颖,林玉鹏. 狂欢视角下的《谁害怕弗吉尼亚伍尔夫?》[J]. 合肥工业大学学报：社会科学版，2010，24(5)：85-88.