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The Role of Tiresias in T. S. Eliot's the Waste Land

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The Role of Tiresias in T. S. Eliot's the Waste Land THE ROLE OF TIRESIAS IN T. S. ELIOT’S THE WASTE LAND by Stephanie Lynne Sergi A thesis submitted to the Department of English, California State University Bakersfield In partial Fulfillment for the Degree of Masters of Arts Spring 2011 Copyright By Stephanie Lynne Sergi 2011 DEDICATION To David – for laughter, love, and lyrics TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1 Introduction ....................................................................................................... 1-11 Chapter 2 Tiresias and Gender ......................................................................................... 12-23 Chapter 3 Tiresias: Mythology and Prophecy................................................................... 24-36 Chapter 4 Tiresias as Modernist Maypole ........................................................................ 37-44 Bibliography...................................................................................................................... 45-48 “ὣς ἐφάμην, οἱ δ᾽ ὦκα ἐμοῖς ἐπέεσσι πίθοντο. (Homer Odyssey 12.222; Murray 464) Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION In this thesis, I seek to resolve the debate over Tiresias’s ability to unify The Waste Land by offering a new perspective—Tiresias as a Modernist Maypole. I propose that Tiresias’s inability to perfectly coalesce the different voices and themes within the poem is not due to an authorial failing but is instead an imperfect unification that may suggest a modernist view of unity. In short, the thesis focuses Tiresias in regards gender, prophecy, and mythology. This thesis argues that Tiresias fails to completely unify The Waste Land; nevertheless, it also maintains that he can, in fact, fuse the poem’s fragments in an unusual way. Tiresias allows for a nuanced view of the poem’s structure by suggesting incomplete connections hidden in the numerous vignettes. An image of a maypole can illustrate this modernist view of unity. A traditional maypole consists of a fixed pole that has ribbons or streamers extending down from the top, and the end of each ribbon is held by a person. Then, the people dance around the pole weaving the ribbons together. In contrast, a modernist maypole would lack some of these ribbons, and others may be frayed or torn. In The Waste Land, Tiresias is the stationary maypole; however, some of the ribbons connecting him to the other characters in the poem are either torn or missing. In true modernist fashion, the maypole, Tiresias, unifies the work by suggesting what it might have been. The debate over Tiresias’s function in the poem stems from an earlier one, which focuses on the literary validity of the notes that Eliot affixed to The Waste Land after its initial publication in The Criterion magazine. The notes to The Waste Land were first published in the 1922 book edition by Boni and Liveright, and their literary value has stirred 2 a controversy, which Eliot discusses in “Frontiers of Criticism” (1956). Within this essay, he discusses the trend of professors writing criticism as a positive development, but he cautions that not all criticism that is produced qualifies as literary criticism. Eliot differentiates between an examination of the literary work and an examination of its author or of extraneous material. For an example, Eliot discusses the impact the notes to The Waste Land have had on literary scholarship. He believes the notes have “stimulated the wrong kind of interest among the seekers of sources” and have resulted in a puzzle that has led critics to stray from the enjoyment and understanding of the poem (534). One critic to whom Eliot may have been referring is George Williamson. In “The Structure of The Waste Land” (1950), Williamson analyzes the structure of The Waste Land. His analysis and evidence rely heavily on the Eliot’s notes, yet Williamson emphasizes that a careful reader should not need the notes to be properly affected by The Waste Land (193). In his analysis of the poem’s structure, Williamsons discusses what he sees as Eliot’s purpose for Tiresias. For Williamson, Tiresias “is not a character in the fortune; but he is the supreme metamorphosis that brings together all the metamorphic transformations and thus qualified to summarize their experience” (202). Regardless of the views of individual critics, discussions surrounding Tiresias spring from the discussion of the debatable relevance of the notes. The value of the notes are further discussed in Jo Ellen Green Kaiser’s, “Disciplining The Waste Land, or How to Lead Critics into Temptation” (1998), refers to the temptation felt by critics to use the notes to The Waste Land as an interpretive tool for understanding the poem. Kaiser firmly states that increasing pagination was not the catalyst for the notes. She believes they are a structural device that underscores the unity of the poem. In her inquiry, Kaiser attempts to produce a timeline showing the decline in the notes’ effectiveness, and she 3 specifically points to T. S. Eliot’s comments in “Frontiers in Criticism” about the notes. Kaiser forcefully disagrees with Eliot’s view that the notes are superfluous. She believes the notes display the poem’s unity and their inclusion reinforces the notion of a unified work. “What interests me, however, is how, when, and why the notes stopped being so effective at convincing critics that the poem is unified” (Kaiser 83). Not all scholars share Kaiser’s passionate belief in the value of the notes. As justification for his editorial contributions in the Norton Critical edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (2001), editor Michael North states that the “notorious notes appended to the first book publication by Boni and Liveright in the United States” are an obstacle to the understanding of the poem, and some of Eliot’s notes “are so blandly pointless as to suggest a hoax, and others particularly those citing classical quotations in the original languages, seem determined to establish mysteries rather than dispel them” (ix). After declaring that most of Eliot’s notes are pointless, North discusses the inclusion of supplementary criticism to his edition of the poem. He believes this supplementary material will clarify the ambiguities of the notes. In addition, North mentions that he has expanded Eliot’s notes in an effort to provide greater clarity to readers. Another Eliot scholar who shares North’s view of the notes is Stanley Sultan. In Eliot, Joyce and Company (1987), Sultan surmises that the notes to The Waste Land are not scholarship to be taken seriously. Instead, Sultan believes “it seems reasonable to dismiss the simplistic concept that the Notes are documentation, as well as to conclude that any narrow and solemn view of their possible function may be inadequate” (167). Sultan sees the notes not so much as material appended to a completed poem but more an additional allusive part of The Waste Land (173). Much of the disagreement about Tiresias’s role as a unifying 4 persona in the poem is, at least in part, a byproduct of the notes Eliot affixes to The Waste Land. Just as critics differ according to their interpretation of The Waste Land’s notes, contemporary scholarship displays vast differences of opinion as to how Tiresias either does or does not unify the poem. For Jewel Brooker Spears and Joseph Bentley (1990), the notes are an integral part of their evaluation of the poem. In Reading The Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation (1990), they state, “in the notes to The Waste Land, when [Eliot] says that ‘what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem,’ he is using words with technical precision” (10). They take this idea of precision and examine the poem—and its notes—emphasizing a literal interpretation. Of particular interest is the declaration Brooker and Bentley give about the limitations of their analytical interpretation. They state, “Our interpretation, of course, is one of many, and like all others, ours is limited” (181). Within this interpretation they focus on Tiresias’s biologically-determined, sexual identity and use him as a linchpin to connect various named personae within the poem, such as Mr. Eugenides and Madame Sosostris (180). In contrast to this literal interpretation, Michael Hancher tries to find proof of Tiresias as a unifying device by providing material that he found outside of the poem and notes to supplement what Eliot wrote in note #218. In “The Adventures of Tiresias: France, Gourmont, Eliot” (1978), Hancher suggests that the following quotation by Anatole France gives insight to Eliot’s intent when incorporating the character of Tiresias into The Waste Land. France states, “We cannot, like Tiresias, be a man and have recollections of having been a woman. We are shut up in our own personality as if in a perpetual prison” (29). Hancher clarifies that France is not mentioned in either the poem’s footnotes of endnotes. 5 However, Hancher believes that the link between France’s quote and Eliot’s use of Tiresias is certain because of the reference to a prison in the final section of the poem. In addition, Hancher suggests that because of Tiresias’s sexual and psychological experiences he should be seen a representative figure within the poem. The aspect of Tiresias’s sexuality is further explored by Cyrena N. Pondrom in ““T. S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land” (2005). Pondrom relies heavily on the Butlerian theory of gender identity to examine the dramatic function of the multiple voices in The Waste Land. Pondrom posits that Eliot uses gender performance as a dramatic foil to convey his ideas of a decaying society, and she focuses not on the lack of fruitful sexual relationships but on the instability inflicted on society by the unbalanced nature of the gendered lives of the performers in the poem. The reduction of society to groupings of gendered lives gives the character of Tiresias a more intense role as the embodiment of both masculine and feminine. In fact, the gender of Tiresias is an important segue to Pondrom’s observation of the narrator: “We assume the narrator of this poem is male because he ‘acts male’” (429).
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