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126 unfathomable and duly damned it, such as J.C. Squire, who after reading it through several times was ‘still unable to make head or tail of it’.44 The enthusiastic review in the TLS (which was written before The Waste Land appeared with its notes) claimed that Eliot’s poem was ‘a collection of flashes’ which strives for ‘no effect of heterogeneity’.45 ‘Flashes of lightening’ was used to describe Eliot’s method in Helen McAfee’s review in the American journal, Atlantic. She praised the poem’s depiction of post-war society as a ‘waste land’ and lauded its ‘striking dramatization of this depth and bitterness.’46 Another American critic, Elinor Wylie, praised the poem for its ‘extremity of tragic emotion’ which was expressed in a series of disparate voices, ‘not carefully and elaborately trained in close harmony, but coming as a confused and frightening and beautiful murmur out of the bowels of the earth’.47 Summarising the sense of heterogeneity and disconnectedness of the text, its abandonment of narrative structure or ‘meaning’, John Crowe Ransom wrote that it was ‘one of the most AQ insubordinate poems in the language’. Other reviewers, however, were more interested in reading The Waste Land as a solvable ‘puzzle’.49 The most important of these reviewers was the young Edmund Wilson writing in The Dial. Wilson began his essay by giving a synopsis of the Grail story, as taken from a hurried reading of From Ritual to Romance, and explains the significance of the waste land therein.50 The Grail quest, he held, was the unifying motif of The Waste Land, drawing together all the fragmentary and seemingly unconnected elements in a whole. It is a reading that for Weston-centric critics has barely changed in eighty years. In 1931 Wilson expanded his Westoniair'reading of the poem in his A xel’s Castle.51 A year later F.R. Leavis codified what would be the reponse of many academics to the poem in his seminal New Bearings in English Poetry, which again reduced Imagist fragments into a thematic coherence. Wilson’s 127 and Leavis’s ideas have been replicated and expanded by numerous critics, among them Cleanth Brooks, Grover Smith, Helen Gardner and George Williamson.52 In Weston-centred readings, the system of symbols Weston presented in From Ritual to Romance (waste land, Fisher King, Lance and Cup) were perceived as an interpretive structure for the poem - Brooks described it as ‘scaffolding’; Williamson called it ‘a subsumptive myth’. In these critics’ works, The Waste Land emerges as a portrait of disintegration and impotence, a description of a ruined world, ‘where once a fertility ritual may have been effectively enacted’ to restore the land to health.54 Whereas the earlier reviewers saw The Waste Land as a ‘complete expression of the poet’s vision of modem life’, which was very much an expression of social collapse, the later Weston-centric explicators saw the poem as primarily a contrast between a rich, spiritual past and a spiritually-void modem sterility.55 They emphasised the religious content of Eliot’s poem to a much larger degree than did the non-Weston interpreters of The Waste Land. F.L. Lucas, who heartily disliked the poem, claimed that ‘Miss Weston is clearly a theosophist’ (she was not), and claimed that Eliot’s poem ‘might be a theosophical tract. The sick king and the waste land symbolise, we gather, the sick soul and the desolation of this material life.’56 Wilson called the waste land ‘the concrete image of a spiritual drouth’.57 Everett A. Gillis put it simply: it is
the portrayal of ‘the decline of religious values in the world’. Cleanth Brooks saw Eliot’s poem as primarily a religious commentary on contemporary agnosticism. His 1939 essay, ‘ The Waste Land: critique of myth’ was a remarkable reading of The Waste Land's use of Weston’s symbolism, which managed to transform a fundamentally agnostic text into an explicitly Christian poem. Brooks began by rehearsing the standard summary of From Ritual to Romance, before demonstrating how Eliot’s poem utilised Weston’s symbols. Brooks revealed, as he 128 elucidated the poem section by section, a coherent meaning to the text. This meaning, Brooks claimed, is not concerned with ‘despair and disillusionment’, or social collapse, or ‘strained nerves and shattered institutions’ as earlier critics had believed.59 Rather, ‘ [t]he “Christian” material is at the centre, but the poet never deals with it directly. The theme of resurrection is made on the surface in terms of the fertility rites; the words which the thunder speaks are Sanskrit words.’60
Darwinian methodology of cultural evolution: Weston had read the Christian romances as later deposits of earlier Celtic and, ultimately, pre-Celtic Gnostic myths. What earlier scholars had thought of as fundamentally Christian iconography, Weston tried to demonstrate as antecedent to it. Brooks reverses the evolutionary process of Weston’s methodology and tries to place the Christian message in an avowedly agnostic text. Brooks’ essay was written a decade after Eliot’s conversion to the Anglo-Catholic Church in 1928. At the time of writing The Waste Land he held no firm Christian belief; indeed, he was considering becoming a Buddhist.61 The ‘hidden Christian centre’ of The Waste Land is not hidden because Eliot wished to avoid f\0 ‘cliches’, as Brooks contends, but because Eliot was, quite simply, not a Christian. Brooks’ argument appears little more than wishful thinking on the part of a conservative American Christian critic. By 1939, then, the perception of The Waste Land as an utterly spiritual poem, based on Westonian symbolism, was complete. Arthurian scholars, by and large, have accepted the Weston-centred reading of Eliot’s poem and have emphasised the text as a chronicle of contemporary religious doubts, maintaining that The Waste Land, commonly regarded as the greatest poem of the twentieth century, is fundamentally an Arthurian poem. Yet it is possible to continue to read Eliot’s poem as Arthurian in Yüklə 2,81 Mb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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