Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth

By Rebeca Gualberto Valverde

This book proposes a renewed myth-critical approach to the so-called 'wasteland modernism' of the 1920s to reassess certain key texts of the American modernist canon from a critical prism that offers new perspectives of analysis and interpretation. Myth-criticism and, more specifically, the critical survey of myth as an aesthetic and ideological strategy fundamental for the comprehension of modernist literature, leads to an engaging discussion about the disenchantment of myth in modernist literary texts. This process of mythical disenchantment, inextricable from the cultural and historical circumstances that define the modernist zeitgeist, offers a possibility for revising from a contemporary standpoint a set of classic texts that are crucial to our understanding of the modern literary tradition in the United States. This study carries out an exhaustive and updated myth-critical examination of works by T.S. Eliot, John Dos Passos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck and Djuna Barnes to broaden the scope of familiar themes and archetypes, enclosing the textual analysis of these works in a wider exploration about the purpose and functioning of myth in literature, particularly in times of crisis and transformation.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9788491348450

Book preview

Introduction

In The Persistence of Modernism Madelyn Detloff describes modernism as a constellation of discourses about wide-spread loss and violence (4). The assessment goes further than traditional definitions of the period, such as Friedman’s well-known claim that modernism responds to the crisis of belief that afflicts western civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century, defined by loss of faith, experience of fragmentation and disintegration, and the shattering of cultural symbols and norms (97). Detloff’s definition focuses on the violence in a mode of representation that changed course after the bloody cataclysm (Levenson Modernism 221) of the First World War, a provocation, a trauma, and a stimulus (220) that shocked the world-picture of modernity and propelled the creation of new forms (227). World War I was a massive catastrophe; it stood as a watershed between Enlightenment ideals, like the constant progress technology promised, and their gruesome disillusionment—in the mass grave into which technological war converted the earth of Europe (Sherry 18). Modernism, after the war, attempts the creation of art from a place of wreckage. It takes place in a mass grave. Enlightenment ideals were lost to the carnage on the battlefield; old cultural symbols and norms are no longer valid to negotiate the horror of contemporary existence. In this context, modernist literature, weary and disillusioned, turns to traditional myth.

In his fundamental study on myth and modernist literature, Michael Bell claims that mythopoeia is the underlying metaphysic of much modernist literature (2). His main claim is that, at the turn of cultural modernity,¹ individuals had to endure the double consciousness of living a world view as a world view (1), that is, an awareness that their own beliefs and understandings were not transcendentally grounded and could not be privileged over the beliefs and understandings of others (1). Myth, once foundational, holistic and inarguable (12), was revealed as objectively not true. Thus, because of its simultaneous reference to belief and to falsehood (3), mythopoeia became a useful vehicle to encapsulate the paradox of the modern world view. Traditional myth, a lost cultural symbol, was now understood as merely a way of seeing the world. As is the claim of the present study, American modernism uses myth precisely as such.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, art focused on recording the emotional impact of the war crisis. It tried out new ways to express the despair, hopelessness, paralysis, angst, and a sense of meaninglessness, which resulted in a cohort of literary scenarios dominated by the various waste lands in modernist literature (Friedman 97). This book aims to explore those various waste lands through a rigorous myth-critical interpretation of six very well-known works of American modernism, analyzing a coherent process of mythical representation and revision that might help decode an active search for meaning (Friedman 97) traceable in the selected corpus. As Friedman wrote, the search for order and pattern began in its own negation, in the overwhelming sense of disorder and fragmentation caused by the modern materialist world (97). As this study will argue, American modernist writers locate primitive myth precisely in that interplay of order and chaos, of pattern and disarray. Myth is undone and redone, shattered in the process of literary representation as it is a cultural icon of a fallen world.

Looking at the many wastelands of modernism from a myth-critical perspective, then, this investigation seeks to probe the modernist reinterpretation of the Arthurian myth of the Waste Land.² Even though well established by the critical tradition that has explored American literature in the twentieth century,³ the topic requires a fresh, in-depth reconsideration. Using the tools of contemporary mythcriticism may provide some clarity for elucidating the meanings constructed, challenged, or reinforced in the specific mythopoetic mechanisms of American modernism. Primitive myth—the pervasiveness of which in modernism might initially be intuited as a reaction against the defeated rationalism of Enlightenment for how it accompanies the collapse of the whole idealist tradition (Bell 20)—is in fact an extraordinarily expressive instrument to represent the conditions of modernity. Myth is not arbitrary, and it is not a neutral framework (Bell 123). In fact, as Horkheimer and Adorno demonstrated decades ago, myth is an age-gold artifact that serves the same purpose of dominion as Enlightenment itself. Myth symbolizes reality so it can be categorized, seeking to report, to name, to tell of origins—but therefore also to narrate, record, explain (Horkheimer and Adorno 5). Myth subsumes the symbolic relating of the actual to a mythical event, just as analytical thought subsumes it to an abstract category in science. In both cases, the present appears as predetermined, imposing a sense of inevitability that justified in the guise of brutal facts as something eternally immune to intervention, the social injustice from which those facts arise (21). For Bell, mythopoeia entails a superstition, the superstition of believing that you have complete intellectual insight or critical power over a complex form of life by reducing it to its ideological configuration (222). He adapts Adorno and Horkheimer to claim that this is the truest form in which mythopoeia lives on in our time and as a continuing product of Enlightenment (222), which accounts for the necessity of a myth-critical appraisal of literature in a time of crisis, as it post-war modernism. This analysis leads to a critical examination of how myth is fractured to an almost complete disintegration. It addresses the ideological consequences of such an unmaking of myth, posing whether the destruction and reconstruction of mythology in modern literature may open new possibilities for construing a different world picture.

The hypothesis seems well integrated into the tradition of modernist studies, for it sheds light on the conundrum that juxtaposes a search for meaning and the simultaneous recreation in paradigms of fragmentation and chaos. On the basis that primitive myth symbolizes dominant ideologies and stands as a guarantor of social and political order, this book will explore the shattering of that symbolization in post-war American modernism. The age-old myth is made anew to express a set of counter-narratives that tragically articulate a collapsed civilization trauma and despair. The result is the challenge of traditional discourses of social order and political stability that broke down after the Great War. In the act of demolition, modernist myth-making presents the possibility of an alternative way of representation for a brand new world.

THE MYTH OF THE WASTE LAND

The earliest extant version of the Waste Land myth, the Arthurian legend that recurs in different shapes in the texts analyzed in this study appears in Chrétien de Troyes‘ Perceval, the Story of the Grail (ca. 1180) (Loomis 28). In this early French romance, the young knight Perceval arrives at the Fisher King’s castle, who has been wounded between the thighs, and whose sexual impotence has been transferred to his kingdom, which has become a wasteland. The story proposes a mystical, sympathetic connection between a king and his kingdom, characterizing kingship mysticism as preternaturally divine. Yet, the French romance Perceval may be just one of the earliest reinterpreted forms of a more ancient mythical tale, perhaps found in Celtic mythology.⁴ According to this theory, ancient Irish myths are believed to have shaped and influenced the Welsh and Breton legends in which one may trace some prototypes for the story of the Fisher King and the Waste Land (Loomis 18). Loomis supports the theory on historical circumstance, since "the conteurs of the twelfth and early thirteenth century were in the main Bretons, descendants of those Britons who in the fifth and sixth century, as a result of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, had emigrated to Armorica, which we now know as Brittany" (13-4). Arthurian critics have thus established a relationship of continuity between ancient Celtic mythology, Welsh myths, Breton legends, and, lastly, the medieval French romances where the story of the Waste Land appears.

The earliest link of this chain are the Irish echtrai, a type of mythic narrative in which the mortal hero visits a supernatural palace, is hospitably entertained, witnesses strange happenings, and sometimes wakes in the morning to find that his host and his dwelling have disappeared (Loomis 47). The parallels with the story of Perceval are quite evident: the young knight, as he journeys back home, finds a wide river he cannot cross. In the river are two men, one of them fishing. He invites Perceval to take shelter in his lodgings for the night, and, in that precise moment, amidst a nearly deserted landscape, appears the high tower of a castle. Perceval is received in a supernatural palace (Loomis 47), where he witnesses strange happenings (de Troyes 420-421). First, a squire enters the room carrying a white lance from whose tip falls a drop of blood, falling down the squire’s hand; then, two other squires, extremely handsome, carry candelabra of pure gold, each with candles burning. Finally, a maiden, noble and richly attired, accompanies them, carrying a grail. As she enters the hall, the room is brightly illuminated. She takes the grail into another chamber while the young knight observes in silence, not daring to ask who the grail serves.

The following morning, in keeping with the Irish prototype described by Loomis, Perceval is astonished when he realizes that there is no one left in the castle. He decides to go to continue his journey, when suddenly he finds a maiden crying, weeping and lamenting, as though she were a woman in great distress (423). She holds in her arms a knight whose head had been cut off (423) and, intuiting that Perceval has spent the night at the Fisher King’s castle, explains to him that the King was wounded and maimed in the course of a battle so that he can no longer manage on his own, for he was struck by a javelin through both thighs (424). He is called the ‘Fisher King’ because, after his castrating injury, he likes to go fishing with a hook. His wound, tragically, has caused the desolation of his kingdom. But if Perceval had dared ask about the meaning of the lance and the grail that he saw at the castle, he would have brought great succour to the good king who is maimed: he would have totally regained the use of his limbs and ruled his lands, and much good would have come of it! (425). Yet, he failed to heal the King and thus did not restore the Waste Land. As mentioned, this story is the earliest version that has remained of the story, which is represented, rewritten, and reinterpreted throughout the Middle Ages. However, the tale’s core meanings, the mystical, inextricable connection between the divine king and his kingdom, and the need to restore the desolated Waste Land will remain more or less invariable.

These primary meanings of the Waste Land myth establish that the Grail, meant to feed the king, must also feed the kingdom. Still, this communitarian sustenance becomes more and more spiritual as Christian romances transform the myth. One significant version is Wolfram Von Eschenbach’s Parzival, composed between 1200 and 1210 by a Bavarian knight-poet. In this romance, the Grail found in the castle of the sorrowing king (Eschenbach 135) is simultaneously described as a cornucopia of the sweets of this world (126) and as explicitly holy. In Chrétien, the sanctity of the Grail is only addressed towards the end of the romance and in very ambiguous terms when Percival’s uncle explains that a single host that is brought to him in that grail sustains and brings comfort to that holy man—such is the holiness of the grail! (Troyes 460). Contrarily, in Eschenbach the conception of the Grail as a pagan talisman of plenty—providing dishes warm, dishes cold, new-fangled dishes and old favorites, the meat of beasts both tame and wild (…) whatever drink a man could name, be it mulberry wine, wine or ruby (126-7)—and as a sacred container of the Corpus Christi is reconciled relatively harmoniously: every Good Friday (…) the Dove brings [a white Wafer] to the Stone, from which the Stone receives all that is good on earth of food and drink (Eschenbach 2980: 240).⁵ The food-producing properties of the Grail have been Christianized yet remain food-producing properties. At this stage, the Grail remains a magical object that ensures the land’s fertility in a very literal sense. However, by the time the Waste Land myth is recounted in English in the fifteenth century, in Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur (1485), the Grail’s nurturing virtue has been codified as strictly spiritual.⁶ The Maimed King’s castle has become the place where the holy meat shall be departed (Malory II 364). The knights do not feast on endless dishes, but kneel before the Holy Vessel, surrounded by angels, to receive their Saviour. Yet the Holy Grail is still defined by its nourishing properties, even if it provides spiritual sustenance instead. This circumstance coincides with the transformation of the Waste Land. Throughout the medieval sources, the land’s affliction transforms from social chaos to barrenness and a state of spiritual degeneration in the later versions.⁷

The reason for this parallel transformation is that the reinterpretation of the Waste Land itself articulates an ideological turn embodied in the medieval Holy Grail. The turn coincides with what Hocart defined as the revolution in mythology brought about by Christianity, according to which a Christian may be lusty and strong, yet, in the words of Malory, ‘dead of sin’ (Hocart 26). In such a religious context, the Grail’s prime function is no longer to serve a feast in a marvelous castle but to provide sustenance, in effect physical and spiritual, to the dispossessed that inhabit the mythical Waste Land. This codifies the medieval myth as a story of communal restoration, social and spiritual. From an ideological standpoint, this new version of the tale is quite different from the alleged sources, a circumstance that Loomis relates to the historical phenomenon of euhemerism: the replacement in Christianity of the pagan deities of mythology for divine or quasidivine monarchs (Loomis 24). According to this theory, Arthurian mythology replaced Irish gods who lived in supernatural palaces with kings whose divinity manifests in the mystical bond that connects them sympathetically to their lands. In doing so, medieval myth articulated the romance ideology that legitimized the political institutions it narrated, which explains the prominence and many variations of the Waste Land myth in the Arthurian canon.

The only source composed in English that collects the entire Arthurian cycle is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, a collection of romances edited as a book by William Caxton in 1485. These late romances, built upon the principle of ‘singleness’ which underlies the normal structure of a modern work of fiction (Vinaver VIII), substantiate how, towards the end of the fifteenth century, what may have been a pagan myth has transformed into an episode in the history of a religious relic that offers the possibility of redemption for a civilization that has been generally corrupted.⁸ The proliferation of maimed kings and wastelands accounts for this collective malady. Malory initially identifies the Maimed King with King Pelles (II 337), who suffered an injury in the thighs trying to obtain a mysterious sword. A few chapters later, however, Pelles and his son travel to find a second maimed king (II 364), King Pellam, father to King Pelles and injured in a battle with Longinus’s spear. As a consequence of Pellam’s injury, a dolorous stroke, three kingdoms are destroyed (I 84), which mirrors what happens after the death of his father, King Labor, whose death in battle brought about a terrible plague, desolating his realm: for sithen increased neither corn, ne grass, nor wellnigh no fruit, ne in the water was no fish: wherefore men callen it (…) the Waste Land (II 334).

Despite the overt Christianisation of the Grail and the pervasiveness of religious relics in different episodes of the romances, the Waste Land myth’s primary meaning remains more or less invariable. There are three separate Maimed Kings in Malory’s romances, and in all cases, life in their kingdoms is dependent upon their welfare. King and kingdom remain magically bound in a crisis that requires urgent regeneration to guarantee social and political continuity. In the late fifteenth century, the repetition of Fisher-King figures as fathers, sons, and even grandsons associates the correlation between castration and the wasting of the land to notions of inheritance and feudal structures’ good functioning. Yet, it does so in a context in which medieval social ideals were beginning to crack. As Barron argues, Malory’s works constitute a display of chivalry so comprehensive as to contain its own critique of the code (Barron 148). This means to say that Malory’s latemedieval romances do not merely depict a set of legitimizing social ideals for medieval power structures. Instead, they present the stories of Arthurian Britain as the narrative articulations of a series of contradictions that characterize the ideological conflicts and dissension of his time, when the confrontation of a medieval worldview and a rapidly-changing social reality led to the collapse of the ideals celebrated in romance mythology. The inherent inconsistencies of these ideals were becoming visible. Towards the end of the fifteen-century, the dominant ideologies of medieval mythology and their legitimization of absolutism and feudalism had apparent limitations as a political model, which was evident to Malory in the failure of the dynastic dream of Arthurian Britain [and] in the chaotic nightmare of contemporary England (Barron 148). In a significant manner, this introduces an early instance of mythical reshaping that expresses meanings of chaos and social dissolution. This is a phenomenon perfectly integrated into the literary history of the Waste Land myth. It is reactivated at different stages throughout tradition—most resonantly, perhaps, in the literature of American modernism.

THE MYTH-CRITICAL FRAMEWORK

Of all the schools of thought that have analysed Arthurian mythology, the most relevant for a study that explores how the myth features in modernist literature is undoubtedly the myth and ritual school. This school, also known as the Cambridge Ritualists, were a group of classical scholars who, in the decade before the First World War, applied James G. Frazer’s theory of myth and ritual to classical mythology and early forms of classical drama (Segal Theorizing 49). Some years later, a contemporary of the Cambridge Ritualists, Jessie Weston, applied the myth and ritual theory to the study of the Grail Legend in her seminal book From Ritual to Romance (1920). This book heavily influenced T. S. Eliot’s representation of the Waste Land myth in his homonymous poem and therefore determined significantly how the myth would be revised in American modernism.

The basic premise of myth-ritualism is the belief that literature harks back to myths that were originally the scripts of the key primitive ritual of regularly killing and replacing the king in order to ensure crops for the community (Segal Theorizing 44). This notion originates, of course, in James G. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890). This highly influential anthropological study of myth and religion advanced the hypothesis that all myths emerge as the narrative transposition (as either a script or an explanation) of ritual ceremonies. The primeval ritual described by Frazer is a rite during which the tribal king—whose body is believed to lodge the spirit of the god of vegetation, according to the second branch of mythritualism—is sacrificed by the community when he falls ill or when his strength diminishes (Frazer 308-329). This sacrifice, magically bound to the passage of the seasons, is teleologically aimed at warranting the restoration of the crops in springtime, since, in Frazer’s hypothesis, all primeval cultures held the belief that the fertility of the land depended upon the strength and vigor of the king. Weston transfers this hypothesis to the Grail’s story, which mythologizes the notion that the welfare of the land is magically bound to the welfare of the king. Translating Frazer’s theory to Arthurian criticism seems logical in the myth-ritual school context, especially when considering the similarities between Frazer’s ritualism and the story of the Fisher King. However, the influence that Weston’s book had upon contemporary literary and critical revisions of the Waste Land myth was decisive for reasons which go beyond the limited impact of the book on Eliot’s poetry and which account for the somewhat transgressive reinterpretation of the myth that is the focus of this study.

From Ritual to Romance entailed a critical revolution in the field of Arthurian Studies since the Grail’s story was critically dissociated from Christianity when Weston argued that the Waste Land myth was, in fact, the literary evolution of an ancient fertility rite. This myth-ritualistic hypothesis somehow reversed the Christianization that the Grail’s story had undergone throughout the Middle Ages as it re-codified the tale as the pagan myth that it had been, allegedly, in origin. This entailed a demystification carried through to the