STUDENT’S STUDY GUIDE (Blook book with photo)
Not waste from war but waste from our civilization
Use of other myths and legends
- Fisher King; reference to From Ritual to Romance by Jessie Weston
- Holy Grail
Symbolism of the myths is sexual
Mythms used to provie a frame and unify
Myth as a parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity
Waste Land as organization of sibylline fragments
Remember that Eliot’s notes may be a spoof; mock-pedantry
Refers to his own poem “The Death of Saint Narcissus” in lines 25 – 29, burial
99: refers to Metamorphoses by Ovid – Philomela raped by King Tereus
209 – 214: events actually happened to Eliot; homosexual implications of the lines; also
parody the Grail legend – Fisher King invites the quester to the Grail castle
urban civilization as “sterile love” Hayward
Most important aid in interpreting the poem
Tiresias’ vision with that of the poet himself
Ovid’s Metamorphoses tells the legend
Eliot: Tiresias is a spectator and not a character
Two sexes meet in Tiresias
Tiresias sees the substance of the poem – visionary or prophetic experience
Where does Eliot get the idea of Tiresias:
Frazer in his edition The Library by Apolodorus (1921)
Ezra Pound Cantos I and III in “Three Cantos (1917)” and The Dial (1921)
Oedipus Tyrannus by Sophocles – Thebes has been turned into a waste land,
people and land infertile
John Dryden (1921) by Mark van Doren
Homer’s Odyssey ii: Tiresias consulted by Odysseus
Levenson: Geneology of Modernism
167
Waste Land most celebrated work of English modernism
ME:
Cannot ignore Eliot with this poem
Anticipation, caused him great pains, now prepared to release to that “decent middleclass mob”
169
A strain exists between the presumed identity of the poem’s speaker and the instability of
the speaker’s world
171
Though we find it difficult to posit one speaker, it is scarcely easier to posit many, since
we can say with no certainty where one concludes and another begins
174: The unifying notion here is the theme of the retrospect, which pervades the poem
and which receives its consummate expression in Tiresias, who is obliged to return to old
scenes and to witness old failures – in short, to endure the agony of retrospection helpless
to change what it vividly sees.
175
F.R. Leavis provided an early and influential defence, reading the poem as the record of
an “inclusive consciousness” – specifically, the consciousness of Tiresias.
184: The self, writes Eliot “passes from one point of view to another…”; no single point
of view is sufficient for knowledge; only in multiple perspectives does the world become
real
185: avoiding dependence on the individual and individual consciousness since a point of
view was more fundamental than an individual
186: The vision was not one of individuals versus authority, but of an authority composed
of individuals
190: In The Waste Land, no consistent identity persists
The poem is not…built upon the juxtaposition of fragments: it is built out of their
interpenetration.
191: We find ourselves in a position to confront a problem, which, though distant, is not
forgotten: the problem of the poem's unity, or what comes to the same thing, the problem
of Tiresias. We may begin to see how Tiresias can serve the function of "uniting all the
rest," without that obliging us to conclude that all speech and all consciousness are the
speech and consciousness of Tiresias. For, if we rush too quickly to Tiresias as a
presiding consciousness, along the lines established by Conrad or James, then we lose
what the text clearly asks us to retain: the plurality of voices that sound in no easy
harmony. What Eliot says of the Absolute can be said of Tiresias, who, also, "dissolves at
a touch into ... constituents." But this does not leave us with a heap of broken fragments;
we have seen how the fragments are constructed into new wholes. If Tiresias dissolves
into constituents, let us remember the moments when those constituents resolve into
Tiresias. Tiresias is, in this sense, an intermittent phenomenon in the poem, a subsequent
phenomenon, emerging out of other characters, other aspects. The two sexes may, as
Eliot suggests, meet in Tiresias, but they do not begin there.
Tiresias functions not as a consistent harmonizing consciousness but
192: as the struggled-for emergence of a more encompassing point of view.
Tiresias provides not permanent wisdom but instants of lucidity during which the poem's
angle of vision is temporarily raised, the expanse of knowledge temporarily widened.
"These fragments I have shored against my ruins." In the space of that line the poem
becomes conscious of itself. What had been a series of fragments of consciousness has
become a consciousness of fragmentation: that may not be salvation, but it is a difference,
for as Eliot writes, "To realize that a point of view is a point of view is already to have
transcended it." And to recognize fragments as fragments, to name them as fragments, is
already to have transcended them not to an harmonious or final unity but to a somewhat
higher, somewhat more inclusive, somewhat more conscious point of view. Considered in
this way, the poem does not achieve a resolved coherence, but neither does it remain in a
chaos of fragmentation. Rather it displays a series of more or less stable patterns, regions
of coherence, temporary principles of order the poem not as a stable unity but engaged in
what Eliot calls the "painful task of unifying."
Within this perspective any unity will be provisional; we may always expect new poetic
elements, demanding new assimilation. Thus the voice of Tiresias, having provided a
moment of authoritative consciousness at the centre of the poem, falls silent, letting
events speak for themselves. And the voice in the last several lines, having become
conscious of fragmentation, suddenly gives way to more fragments. The polyphony of
The Waste Land allows for intermittent harmonies, but these harmonies are not sustained;
the consistencies are not permanent. Eliot's method must be carefully distinguished from
the methods of his modernist predecessors. If we attempt to make The Waste Land
conform to Imagism or Impressionism, we miss its strategy and miss its accomplishment.
Eliot wrenched his poetry from the self-sufficiency of the single image and the single
narrating consciousness. The principle of order in The Waste Land depends on a
plurality of consciousnesses, an ever-increasing series of points of view, which
struggle towards an emergent unity and then continue to struggle past that unity.
Dean in Laity and Gish, Gender, Desire, and Sexuality
44
According to Eliot, “impersonalist poet becomes a medium for others’ voices; in this way
impersonality provides a means of access to to others instead of a means of hiding
onewself.” Impersonality “allows us to grasp how Eliot’s conception of the poet as a
passive medium for alien utterances tacitly feminizes the poet’s role. His feminizing
poetic practice in this way suggests historically specific comparisons between the
impersonalist poet and the figure of the medium as fortune-teller or clairvoyant.
“Madame Sosostris represents “ideal poetic type,” not “demaning portrayl of women.”
While Madame Sosostris stands as the poem’s best known medium, she is not the only
figure associated with clairvoyance. Both the Sibyl, whose words compose the poem’s
epigraph, and Tiresias, who supposedly unites the poem, are second-sighted. Given that
Eliot derived Madame Sosostris’s name from a fortune-teller called Sesostris in Aldous
Huxley’s Crome Yellow (a novel published only in November 1921), biographer Lyndall
Gordon is justified in claiming that the Sosostris scene must have been a significant late
addition to the poem; her pack of cards "is a unifying device," Gordon suggests, "a late
attempt to draw the fragments together with a parade of the poem’s characters." Madame
Sosostris is thus in one respect a modern incarnation of Tiresias, himself "the most
important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest," according to Eliot’s note. It is not
only as mediums but also as ostensibly unifying consciousnesses that Tiresias and
Sosostris represent surrogates for the impersonalist poet.
54
A rather different way of reading Eliot’s gestures of renunciation stems from recognizing
in the modernist use of masks a technique of self-dispossession that entails a structural
rather than a psychological form of masochism. By this I mean that impersonal
masking—the speaking in a voice other than one’s own—involves the poet in a
suspension or diminuition of self that tends to accompany the poetic medium itself,
irrespective of his or her own preferences. While modernist impersonality is readily
grasped as entailing the use of personae, we need not understand masking as solely or
even primarily a technique of concealment. Persona originally referred to the mask worn
by actors in Greek drama, but the word etymologically derives from the Latin phrase per
sonare, meaning "to sound through." Rather than designating the visual form hiding the
actor’s face, persona initially denoted the mask’s mouthpiece or a reed device inserted
into it for amplifying the actor’s voice. Thus in the first place a persona was less a means
of visual concealment than of vocal channeling; it entailed a form of speaking through
rather than of speaking falsely. More than a mode of camouflage, impersonation may
represent a way to inhabit other existences—a way to transform oneself by becoming
possessed by others. This distinction furnishes us with a rationale for approaching
modernist impersonality as a strategy not of dissimulation but of access to regions of
voice beyond the self’s.
56
“In place of the modern rationalist understanding of individual personality, Elito
subsitutes a premodern – or postmodern – notion of the self as disunified and
unboundend, a self that functions as a conduit not only for voices of the dead but perhaps
for others’ experiences too.”
57
Eliot’s ideas about occult transmission are dramatized in The Waste Land. While
Madame Sosostris stands as the poem’s best known medium, she is not the only figure
associated with clairvoyance. Both the Sibyl, whose words compose the poem’s epigraph,
and Tiresias, who supposedly unites the poem, are second-sighted. Given that Eliot
derived Madame Sosostris’s name from a fortune-teller called Sesostris in Aldous
Huxley’s Crome Yellow (a novel published only in November 1921), biographer Lyndall
Gordon is justified in claiming that the Sosostris scene must have been a significant late
addition to the poem; her pack of cards "is a unifying device," Gordon suggests, "a late
attempt to draw the fragments together with a parade of the poem’s characters." Madame
Sosostris is thus in one respect a modern incarnation of Tiresias, himself "the most
important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest," according to Eliot’s note. It is not
only as mediums but also as ostensibly unifying consciousnesses that Tiresias and
Sosostris represent surrogates for the impersonalist poet.
59:
“The associatioin of physical blindness with spiritual vision connects the Sosostris
passage to a more authentic clairvoyant, Tiresias.
“Barsani locates the origin of human sexuality in masochism, which makes the intensity
of erotic pleasure a consequence of abandoning the self rather than of consolidating ith
through donmination of others.”
“With Bersani’s account in mind, we could say that the "appeal of powerlessness"
concerns aesthetic pleasure as much as it does erotic Jouissance, because the medium
requires a self-shattering or impersonalization that is synonymous with poetic practice
itself.”
“Eliot’s poetry makes clear that aesthetic impersonality threatens masculinity as we know
it. Impersonality undermines masculinity because it enjoins the renunciation of selfpossession and self-control.
Tiresias represents a particularly disturbing outcome of the self—transformation that
poetic utterance demands.
“Tiresias’ importance does not
(60) lie in his role as the poem’s unifying device (per New Critical criteria), nor in his
representing a type for other characters (such as Madame Sosostris). Instead, as a figure
for gender –switching and self-transformation, Tiresias embodies the medium’s
entailments.”
Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the limits of interpretation
7
Possible to achieve a transcendent perspective from which things could be imagined more
holistically, a sort of platform from which the artist could gain a unique perspective on
his material
45
A seer confined within the closed system of a jar or bottle
Tiresias differs from other human beings in not being restricted to a single perspective at
a single moment
The knower is limited toa single perspective, and although the perspective changes from
moent to monetn, it is single in any given moment
46
Because all the perspectives in an endless series of perspective are within a system, the
series is bound to generate a feeling of disorder
47
Tiresias is mythic creature with “experience in several realms of knowing and being.”
Tiresias enjoys “both a mythic and relational mode of knowing and being and, moreover,
enjoy both at once.”
They can see from the inside and outside
52
By simultaneously or in alternation occupying both an ideal mytic platform and a real
position within the house of history, the poet permits binary vision
53
Tiresias defines a binary perspective that serves as the p.o.v of the poem. He is a figure
from the ideal order of myth; yet he is spying on the sordidly historical typist and clerk.
By saying that Tiresias is spying on all the characters, Eliot is suggesting that the reader
make an effort to perceive them in a n equivalent way, from both internal and external
perspectives. From a position insde the modern world, the characters are distinct and
separate, but from the Tiresias or mythic position, the characters “melt” into each other.
54
Tiresias perceives contemporary world in the poem from a perspective outside space and
time altogether
He suggests to the reader that The Waste Land is a phenomenon to be viewed from the
perspective of the Absolute, or at least from a more comprehensive perspective
We as readers are obliged to experience the poem in two ways at once: from a
perspective in our own time where its lack of clear order is its distinguishing
characteristic and from a synthetic or imagined perspective from which it has a
metaphysical substance
56 When reading passage in Fire Sermon, “the reader who is ignoring Tiresias as narrator
experiences only [the typist’s and clerk’s failure to merge].” They are a failed relation.
But when readers consent ot eh mediation of Tiresias as both narrator and voyeur, their
points of reference are multiplied.
From Tiresias’ perspective, both subject and object exist as aspects of that mind. From
his perpective, they are fused, “melted into each other.”
Question of what if Tiresias himself judges the transaction of typist and clerk as failed
relation
 he is moving between two lives, between contemporaneity and timeless perspective;
he reminds us of his temporal versatility, his competence in perceving from several
viewpoints
59
Through Tiresias, Eliot is trying to provide a means for the reader to transcend jarring
and incompatible worlds, to move to ahigher viewpoint that both includes and transcends
the contemporary world
140 – 143
152
Eliot, Joyce, and Company (tied with Levenson)
182 -185
Tiresias is not the ultimate speaker as other maintain because Eliot’s note is not to be
taken seriously
Eliot refers literally to the centrality of Tiresias because his introduction is in fact placed
at the very middle of the poem
Tiresias note is playful
Furthermore, a discrete Tiresias would be an unlikely ultimate speaker and controlling
consciousness for The Waste Land because, in the poem, the context is spiritual
Tiresias is a pagan, able to “see” what ordinary mortals seek, and who has “foresuffered
all,” is a singularly in appropriate Holy Grail quester, who despairs of success, and who
suffers as he does at the end of “The Fire Sermon” and in “What the Thunder Said.”
T.S. Eliot: Design of his poetry by Drew
67
But Tiresias is blind, so the ancient seer seems therefore to represent the eye of the mind,
a universal contemplative consciousness, almost ‘the historical sense’ itself. As such, it
is the inner reality which subsists through all experience that he sees, which units past
and present, men and women, the ‘characters’ in the poem and the’I’ who is its
mouthpiece
80 Typist and ‘the young man carbuncular: irony in that “it is not the fire of lust at all
which is illustrated, but merely the complete indifference towards chastity.”
Introduction of Tiresias,…points to two levels of meaning, and the flavour of debased
ritual is caught and emphasized by the entrance of the formality of rhyme to describe its
cheap tawdriness
Parody of the fertility ritual
81
Automatic, mechanical nature of the sexual performance
Waste Land: study of his writing by several hands (GO BACK TO LOOK FOR
QUATRAINS)
9
Modern waste land as a realm in which people do not even exist – loss of individuality,
personae
Fire Sermon makes use of several of the symbols already developed – Sosostris mentions
Mr. Eugenides, the one-eyed merchant; pure song of the children reminds the poet of the
song of the nightingale heard in Game of Chess
21
The tragic chorus to the scene is Tiresias, into whom perhaps Mr. Eugenides may be said
to modulate, Tiresias, the historical ‘expert’ on the relation between the sexes
Other items have arguably more meaning as they are allusioned repeatedly throughout the
poem: Tiresias does not appear elsewhere (arguably in Sosostris) like other items  does
Tiresias have same meaning even if not transferred to other contexts??
35
The poem would undoubtedly be "clearer" if every symbol had a single, unequivocal
meaning; but the poem would be thinner, and less honest. For the poet has not been
content to develop a didactic allegory in which the symbols are two-dimensional items
adding up directly to the sum of the general scheme. They represent dramatized instances
of the theme, embodying in their own nature the fundamental paradox of the theme.
Tiresian Poetics
15
T.S. Eliot, whose poem The Waste Land includes arguably the most well-known use of
Tiresias in twentieth-century English literature
23
The Tiresian figure function as cultural shorthand for sexual and gender variance, usually
a figure of homoerotic potential, frequently aligned with the feminine or effeminate.
Further, the Tiresian figure foregrounds the importance of voice as a literary,
symptomatic, and sexological category.
Problematic status of the Tiresian as simultaneously a figure of both explortation and
containment
For Eliot, the Tiresian is a marker of vertiginous anxieties about sexual identity and
masculinity, so much so that Eliot attempts to contain the trajectories of sexual and
textual irresolution and signification – and textual representation of disgust for the female
and the bodily – through the transcending voice and vision of the mythic prophect.
Carol Christ: Gender Voice and Figuration
31
The early sections of the poem, up to the entry of Tiresias, develop the strategy of
"Portrait of a Lady." They juxtapose the meditations of a male voice with a number of
female portraits: Mme. Sosostris, the wealthy woman and the working-class woman in
"A Game of Chess," Marie, the hyacinth girl, and, in Eliot's rough draft of the poem,
Fresca. In this collage Eliot gives the women of the poem the attributes of traditional
literary character. They inhabit settings, they exist in dramatic situations, they have
individual histories, and they have voices. They constitute most of the identified speakers
in the first three sections of the poem, and they contain among them a number of figures
for the poet: the sibyl of Cumae; Mme. Sosostris with her Tarot deck; Fresca, who
"scribbles verse of such a gloomy tone / That cautious critics say, her style is quite her
own"; and La Pia, who can connect "nothing with nothing." One might appropriately
object that these are for the most part satiric portraits (indeed, some of them savagely
satiric), but they are nonetheless the ways in which the poem locates both verbal fluency
and prophetic authority.
33
The poem changes its figuration of gender with the introduction of Tiresias. Eliot states
in a note to the passage that "the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is
the substance of the poem" -- a declaration that critics have tended to view rather
skeptically. But what Tiresias sees is the sight that the poem has heretofore evaded: the
meeting of the sexes, a meeting that Tiresias experiences by identifying with the female.
As the typist awaits her visitor, Tiresias asserts, "I too awaited the expected guest," and at
the moment when the house agent's clerk "assaults" her, he states, "And I Tiresias, have
foresuffered all," a position assumed again in the lines spoken by La Pia. Paradoxically,
when the poem assumes the position of the female, male character becomes far more
prominent: in the satiric portrait of the house agent's clerk, which is the first extended
satiric male portrait in the poem, in the image of the fishermen, and in the extended
fisherman's narrative that originally began Part IV and concludes with the death of
Phlebas. As if repeating the doubleness of identification that Tiresias represents, that
death affords at once the definitive separation of male identity and a fantasy of its
separation of male identity and a fantasy of its dissolution as "He passed the stages of his
age and youth / Entering the whirlpool."
60 – 61
The Fire Sermon offers not satire revealing emptiness but satire in the service of deepr
emotion, and the sequence of quatrain that follows these lines detail s a seduction scene
worthy of Summer
Sequence of simple quatrains from “The time is now propitious…welcome of
indifference.”
They are a triumph of dramatic rendering
“and I tiresias have foresuffered all,” reminds us that this scene is filtered through a
sensibility like Burbank’s or Gerontions.
61
In Tiresias Eliot epitomized the emotional center of The Waste Land, and the emotion
remaind quintessentially American. Here is the detached observer, the victim of fatal
introspectiveness and disintegrating skepticism. But more important , here is a sensibility
painfully aware of that “deeper psychology” Eliot admired in Hawthorne and James
TS Eliot’s Poetry and Plays
Grover Smith
88
What Tiresias sees summarizes the theme of lust in the poem, besides furnishing in the
Grail pattern an episode of the quester’s attempted seduction by maidens. Moreover, the
act of love, debased through the absence of love into a kind of chemical reaction…
Tiresias recognizes in this affair the endless repitions of vice, his own agony, and his own
guilt.
Tranquility of an ear before his failure
91
The quest to be reconciled through love and the fusion of body and spirit has reached
nothing except disappointment up to St. Augustine and Buddha
98
In the Waste Land, the business of Tiresias is to restore his youth, which, in a manner of
speaking, has been slain…
He fails
In proclaiming his madness, Tiresias is announcing that he has become a prophet to warn
the crumbling world. Over against the prospect of its irremediable calamity stands the
counsel of the Aryan myth, to give, sympathize, and be controlled, that all may come at
length to peace.
Poem ends with focus on present Tiresias
Memories have dramatized past effort to appease fleshly and spiritual desire
He has his fragments
His quest through his private waste land has achieved nothing that either fertility,
religion, or the ascetic traditions set a s a positive goal. His quest for love has failed; his
quest for spiritual knowledge remains only inceptive and must still proceed, not through a
mere formality of religion, but through inward conversion. But the very act of
recognition , the deliberate acknowledgment of himulity, points toward ultimate triump,
if not for society, nevertheless for himself.
Emery-Peck: Genres in Waste Land’s Pub
Churchill Outing T.S. Eliot
HeroismRole Reader
Rewriting the American Waste Land: Updike’s Canteur
What Tiresias“sees” is the “substance” of Eliot’s poem, and what Peter
“perceives” is the“subject-matter” of Updike’s novel. They both assume diverse
roles and speak in different voices while surveying the chaotic panorama of their
respective cultures. Tiresias has “walked among the lowest of the dead” in Hades
(Eliot 72); Peter has moved among the “[l]iving corpses” (250), which, according to
Updike’s “Mythological Index” (at the end of the book), is analogous to Hades
(302).
With these and other intertextual allusions, he, like Eliot,
makes a display of dreadful degradation in contemporary America by juxtaposing
the divine past with the degenerate present. The Waste Land has a
broken narrative in tune with the fragmented nature of the modern culture.
Except a common connection in Tiresias, there is no continuity or coherence
among the various sections and stanzas in the entire poem. It is a heap
of fragments brought together by the narrator in an attempt to create order
out of chaos.
Eliot borrows from Dante to forcefully convey Tiresias’s horrifying
wonderment at the spiritual death of modern humanity in pursuit of
crass monetary gains.
Notes in Wasteland
Shift from a crisis of order to a crisis of reading:
Note #10
Green, A. (2001). "T.S. Eliot's use of allusion in The Waste Land.(Critical
Essay)." The English Review 11(4): 10.
Eliot's extensive use of allusion has a profound impact both upon the reader and upon his
poetry. With its vast array of literary voices, the certainty of the narrative or authorial
persona is removed; the comfortable notion that one unified perception is possible is
taken away, and the reader is faced with a clamouring of fragmentary voices.
What Eliot is searching for is a symbiotic relationship between the contemporary artist
and his predecessors, where both stand as distinct statements of poetic intent, but where
they can also react together to achieve an entirely new effect
A significant example of this is Tiresias in 'The Fire Sermon'. In the context of The Waste
Land, Tiresias becomes far more than the blind, bisexual prophet of Ovid's
Metamorphoses, although both his blindness and his sexuality maintain their importance.
Key to Eliot's method in introducing Tiresias into the work is the way that he is perceived
to grow naturally from the world of the poem, as a logical extension of its milieu. A web
of verbal as well as literary connections ties him firmly into the modern-day world of the
poem, as can be seen from the following passage:
At the violet hour…
Tiresias conforms to and emerges from the fabric of the contemporary. Both 'the human
engine' and Tiresias are 'throbbing' in anticipation of the sexual encounter which is about
to take place. He is 'between two lives' not only in the sense that he is bisexual, but also
in that he links the past and the present, and that he bridges the two aspects of life the
passage deals with -- work and home. Therefore, in his combined roles as the past/present
and the man/woman, Tiresias is not only an atemporal voyeur, but also, in a sense, both
participants. He may be said to embody the whole scene.
This serves to point out the highly symbolic nature of Eliot's allusions. The importation
of Tiresias into The Waste Land fulfils a central role in the operation of the poem as a
whole. Eliot indicates his significance when, in his notes on the poem, he writes that
'although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', [Tiresias] is yet the most
important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest'. The great prophet of the Classical
world brings to the world of The Waste Land the essential gift of wisdom. Although
blind, Tiresias has the ability, so rare in the poem, to see. Unlike his counterpart in 'The
Burial of the Dead', Madame Sosostris, his prophecies are grounded on the reality of his
own experience, not upon a deck of cards. As he points out,
I, Tiresias, have foresuffered…
So it is that he is able to understand so intimately the nature of the encounter between the
typist and her 'young man carbuncular' and to provide us with a centralising perspective
upon it, as he does on the poem as a whole. He provides, in effect, a plane upon which
the varied voices of the poem can meet, emphasising the importance Eliot places on
historical and experiential continuity.
Liveley, G. (2003). "Tiresias/Teresa: a "man-made-woman" in Ovid's
Metamorphoses 3.318-38." Helios 30(2): 147(16).
He is one of few figures in Ovid's poem of transformation whose metamorphosis is
impermanent. (2) He is a man made woman made man again, and it is on the premise of
this transsexual experience that he is introduced to Ovid's narrative. (3) Having lived as
both man and woman--his temporary sex change being the result of once striking two
copulating snakes with his staff--Tiresias is assumed to have direct knowledge of the
different voluptas (sexual pleasure) experienced by men and women. He is considered to
be doctus (learned) about men, women, and sex, and also to possess a privileged
"authority of experience" when it comes to questions of sex and gender. Thus, when the
gods disagree over whether men or women experience greater sexual pleasure--Jupiter
says women do, Juno disagrees--Tiresias is called in as arbiter:
Tiresias can see and know the future, but he can do nothing to influence it, and his words
of prophecy are uselessly ambiguous. (20) He may see the future, but when he speaks
about what he knows, when he attempts to represent his knowledge, we do not know
what he is saying.
As the gods attempt to stabilize and define gender positions on a differential basis,
Tiresias's experiences as a "man-made-woman" points to the radical instability of
definitions of male and female difference.
Bolton, M. J. (2007). Eliot's The Waste Land. Explicator, Heldref Publications. 66:
25-29.
Although Eliot’s notes claim that Tiresias is“the most important personage” in The Waste
Land because “what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem,” most critics have
recognizedthis proposition as an ex-post-facto imposition of form on a poem that is
fundamentally polyglossic. Kenner calls the note “an afterthought” (150), whereas
Koestenbaum argues that a message Ezra Pound scribbled to Eliot in the draft’s
margins—“make up / yr. mind / you Tiresias / if you know / know damn well / or / else
you / dont” (Eliot, Facsimile 47)—convinced the poet that “this androgynous seer was
the poem’s center” (Koestenbaum 128). Eliot’s anxious attempt in his notes to identify a
master narrator for The Waste Land may only underscore its absence in the poem. Nor
does the poem have a unitary protagonist. Critics such as Calvin Bedient who would read
The Waste Land as a series of trials suffered by one individual “grail quester” may have
accepted too credulously Eliot’s notes on From Ritual to Romance (“Ms. Weston’s book
will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do” [52]).
Further complicating the issues of narrator and character, some of their speakers are
participants in the actions they describe, whereas others, notably Tiresias, are witnesses.
Rather than searching for a master narrator or a unitary protagonist, one is better served
by identifying recurring figures or types whose voices sound in one scene and echo in
another.
In part 3, “TheFire Sermon,” the “violet hour” is associated with sexual yearning.
Tiresias says, “At the violet hour, when the eyes and back / Turn upward from the desk,
when the human engine waits / Like a taxi throbbing waiting” (215–17). The phrase
recurs a few lines later: “At the violet hour,” Tiresias can see “the typist home at teatime”
(220, 222). Tiresias, who was once transformed into a woman as a punishment for having
watched the copulation of two snakes in a wood outside Athens (Ovid l.327–30), spies on
the typist and the city clerk at twilight during their perfunctory, cold-blooded sexual
liaison. The passage from “What the Thunder Said” seems to collapse Tiresias’s two
instances of voyeurism: the sexual allure of the woman causes the speaker to think of the
instinctual, predatory motions of animals. The reference to “violet light” may likewise
collapse two emasculated seers, the husband of “A Game of Chess” and Tiresias, to
produce a composite speaker whose vision of crawling bats is profoundly sexual in
origin.