The "Hero" in Modernism With Some Classic Support

            Linking anything to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland is bound to bring up a meaningful discussion, since the very basis of Modernism is making the present include the past with the same effort that people put into their worship of the texts of religion.  Bringing up the subject of the hero is not only a topic that garners appreciation, it is a bulls-eye for the modernist reader.

            The title, “The Wasteland” is the first nod to the past, by inciting Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, the classic tales associated with the myths that have surrounded the famous Knights of the Round Table.  This series of tales is so famous that many other authors have written poetry about Morte d’Arthur, such as Tennyson, who has been a huge influence on T.S. Eliot. 

            Linking the tales from Morte d’Arthur with The Quest of the Holy Grail is by no means a stretch. 

When looking for the connection of the hero and the quests they go on within The Wasteland one has to do some digging, as modernism demands.  While examining T.S. Eliot’s poem, it is so immense in verbal scope that it is hard at times to really think of it as a poem. Yet, one must adhere to the ‘rules’ of poetry in order to try and tease out the deeper meaning that is in lurking in the shadows.  One of these rules is to identify a speaker. Tiresias identifies himself in line 218, within III. Fire Sermon, “I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives,” (Eliot, 218).  Now that Tiresias is known as the speaker, how does one link him/her to being a hero, and also on a quest much like the Knights of the Round Table? 

         

   

In line 218, Tiresias says he is blind, since he is the blind man that can see everything, and throbs between two lives.  This line alone can bring up many dualistic and binary relationships, such as past and present, which is the focus of modernism; good and evil, which is a classic religious motif; or man and woman which is brought up throughout time in myths such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses.  Tiresias then clears up this question with line 219, “Old man with wrinkled female breasts” (Eliot, 219). This just means that the scope of Tiresias’ telling of this story brings everyone into its scope.

            The hero of The Quest of the Holy Grail is Galahad, which is a departure from the usual heroes which

~Statue of Galahad in Ottawa, Ontario~

were Lancelot and Gawain. This is because Galahad was essentially Jesus, and could not have his life marred with the victories and human fallibilities of his father, Lancelot, and Gawain, sadly was also too human.  Galahad in his pureness went on a quest to find the holy grail, but since the title of the text was Quest of the Holy Grail, this entails that finding the grail was not the terminus of the quest, it was becoming a pure enough soul with the ability to hold the symbol of God up.  The Grail was a vessel, just like the body is a vessel, so, in order to hold the vessel of God’s grace, then one must become a vessel for God’s grace. So the quest, in and of itself was a quest for purity, and to become a symbol for others to look up and likewise become more apt to live a purer life.  Galahad is also somewhat divorced from his father, becoming an example of knighthood, God’s symbolic and all too real warrior of the medieval ages that Lancelot could never approach.  This switch is shown by the recognition of Lancelot’s place as this example by Guinevere, the authority on these things in Arthurian legends, when she says, “’In God’s name,’ she said, ‘if you will not name him, I will.  He who begot you is known as Sir Lancelot of the Lake, the fairest and best and more gracious of knights,” (Quest, 48) and then later when a ninja-like monk enters the path of Lancelot, and Lancelot identifies himself, the monk replies, “’Lancelot,’ said the other, ‘in God’s name you are the last man I was bent on meeting: for there is no sorrier knight than you.” (Quest, 135).  This establishes that Lancelot is not the hero. The text establishes it is because of his sins.  Galahad has no such sins since he does not have much of a life, or nor history. How does one really be that pure?  It is impossible, and the text pretty much supports that this is impossible.  Galahad is the impossible form of humanity, yet by having the other knights try and follow him this becomes an example to the readers that they too are less perfect than even the knights, or at least have something in common with them, making the quest for a purer soul not so out of reach.

            The very steps of this quest is full of conflicts.  These conflicts look like they are outward in nature, yet they are always internal, since each action is being weighed not only by themselves, but by God. These series of quests and stories illustrates how everyone can be a hero in God’s eyes, and empowers the readers through these lessons.  Each story in The Quest of the Holy Grail takes on a particular set of human traits and talks about them.  Thankfully there are monks, which represent the priest’s place in the world as the interpreters of the Bible and the other religious texts and ideas. These monks make things much clearer, and help develop understanding of each knight’s failings and successes in their quests.

            Tiresias is also preaching purity and cleansing.  Throughout the poem, there are seemingly different narrators.  This confuses the readers, but when Tiresias reveals himself (or herself?), he shows that he/she is both the female and male thus is the narrator no matter what gender is evidenced.   

            Throughout The Wasteland, strong imagery is employed to give a dark picture of what the society is like in post-industrial England.  It starts with, “I. The Burial of the Dead” which seems to be talking about memories. The darkness of the scene is brought to fore by the description of the weather, then the use of the Tarot cards adds mystery along with a foreboding feel by using the “Hanged Man” card.  The scene painted in the first portion of the poem is dire, and is perfect for a feeling that something needs to be changed to be seeded in the mind of the reader.

       The second scene, “II. A Game of Chess”, three women are conversing.  This story tells of the wasteful nature of sex and sexuality in the current era further deepening the pall of depression that has gripped England.  The woman who has taken the drugs for an abortion has no teeth, and is being harassed about this, “Now Albert's coming back, make yourself a bit smart./  

He'll want to know what you done with that money he gave you/

To get herself some teeth.  He did, I was there.” (Eliot, 143-145). This both shows how women were trying to express their sexuality, but was still under the oppression of male dominance.  This dominance was not only the male’s doing, but was self-defeating by the women too, in their unhealthy and un-reproductive forms of sexuality.

               The third scene, “III. The Fire Sermon” is where Tiresias shows itself.  He is not exactly a hero, but he starts to show that there is a hero.  Through the love affairs that actually had no love associated with them, a warning of acting out of lust rather and love is provided.  In the shortest fourth scene, “IV. Death by Water”, Phlebas is drowned in the symbol of live and picked clean by its inhabitants. Warning that even those with perfect physical form cannot outlive the karma they have built up. These two acts, like in The Quest of the Holy Grail, show skin-deep sentiments will not get one far.

     The last scene, “V. What The Thunder Said”, then lets us see who the real heroes are: 

the readers. 

“After the frosty silence in the gardens / After the agony in stony places” (Eliot 323-324), is a line that represents the image of what silent people are like and what happens to them. Eliot then shows the readers that they have something that God has given them which is their voice.  Through the illustrations of sound via the water, cicada and hermit-thrush, (hermit being a great choice of words, since they were the bringers of understanding in The Quest for the Holy Grail), Eliot shows how God gave us, the readers, voice, and we should use it. He goes on to show how that everyone actually knows was is wrong but can’t seem to speak up, which is represented by this: 

“We think of the key, each in his prison / thinking of the key, each confirms a prison.”

 (Eliot, 412-413).  

            The Wasteland is a quest to understand that the people can speak up, but must be educated in order to do so. Instead of a pure soul, Eliot is looking for a better society, and the heroes are the people of society where their voices are their swords. 

It Takes a Woman to Show the Woman’s Point of View—It Takes Everyone to Listen

             Helen Doolittle made no mistake when she picked out Helen of Troy to vicariously vent her life through. History states that she was friends, and a patient of Sigmund Freud, the famous psychoanalyst.  History also states that she was a bisexual in a man’s world that held little understanding or forgiveness for people who strayed not only from gender roles, but the expectations of sexuality. 

H.D., as she is commonly seen as today, has tried to cement her place in the world of modernism in the same hallowed halls as T.S. Eliot.   She was accepted, but she did not feel as if she had reached her pinnacle of expression in the fading world of modernism.  Through her final long poem, Helen in Egypt, she not only brought in the aspects of looking deeper into the art and linking it with its origins, but she added the dimension of having the readers look deeper into the text in order to look into the life of H.D. herself. Like many other works, the ‘big reveal’ is at the end of her text, under the collection of ultra-reflective stories in Eidolons, which cements the notion that Helen in the text is really a reflection of Helen in reality. 

The first lines of the poem place Helen not in troy, “Alas my brothers / Helen did not walk / upon the ramparts, / she whom you cursed / was but the phantom and the shadow thrown / of a reflection;” (Doolittle 5).  The overall plot of the book is ingenious, as Helen, who started the war with the beauty of her face, is placed in Egypt instead, so the people who are fighting the war are fighting over an illusion, which in modern feminism, could be translated into men fighting over the illusion of the male gaze.   By using the context of the actual geography of Sparta and Troy, and then looking at where Egypt is, H.D. has drawn an upside down triangle, with the pinnacle pointing down at Egypt where Helen is.  The upside down triangle has two meanings, one is an ancient depiction of the womb, symbolizing fertility and the feminine, it is called the chalice.  Another more contemporary meaning is homosexuality, as many people have thought that the Nazi’s would denote the upside down black triangle for unsociable types, which might have included lesbians or homosexuals. Lesbians today use a black or pink inverted triangle as a symbol.  Helen being located at the tip of that triangle is not only at the farthest point from Sparta and Troy, but is also at the focal point of femininity.  If this symbol is also a gay symbol, by having men fighting each other over her, and her being at the feminine point on the triangle, then her sexuality might also be on display. 

               The title, and the first lines of the poem have painted a scene where Helen can be very free in some ways. The narrative in the play is deceptive.  There are italicized paragraphs before each story.  One might think that these are paraphrased summaries of the poems that come after them, but they are only words to help paint the setting.  It is like using prose to describe poetry.  For the layman who does not want to delve too deeply into art, picking up this book may be an immense mistake, as gods get renamed over and over again, and the dizzying array of events told through poetry is painstaking at best.  This is the biggest challenge to reading, and effectively understanding the work of H.D.. Yet, for those who wish to delve deep into art and literally educated themselves through this text, it is a rich treasure that yields a flavorful depiction of the female recounting of events, which is largely an ignored point of view.

              The Iliad, men are the ones doing most of the talking.  Women are usually helpless, and can only protest vocally by appealing to a part of men that was unnatural: their unwarlike sides. The Iliad actually in many ways makes the women seems wiser for their protests, since they appeal to reason, and have very few lines, which gives more power to their appeals, much like how people will lean in to listen to a whisper.

~How women are at the mercy of the Male gaze~

H.D. empowers Helen through her trysts with men such as Achilles.  While rape seemed to be common and commoditized females, Helen wore them like badges of honor.  Instead of being called a whore, she instead is a hero.  In book two, H.D. talks about how Helen being removed from the war is actually a freedom that she not endures, but embraces: “I do not want to hear Agamemnon /  and the Trojan Walls, / I do not want to recall shield, helmet, greaves, / though he wore them, / for that, I might recall them, / being part of his first / unforgettable anger; / I do not want to forget his anger, / not only because it brought Helen / to sleep in his arms / but because he was, in any case , / defeated; if he strangled her / and flung her to the vultures, / still, he had lost / and they had lost — / the war-Lords of Greece.” (Doolittle 18-19). It must be pointed out that the last part of that quote has a “—“ in it next to lost.  This could be a phallic symbol, and by the defeat (by Helen) they are symbolically castrated.  H.D. by the very fact of being a woman gives her the inherent ethos to rewrite this reaction of Helen.  Her rewriting of Helen’s role in the war, or more aptly Helen’s role in her own life and the lives of others is uniquely suited to the growing need to understand the feminine point of view.  Originally, as seen in

               H.D., by writing Helen in Egypt literally takes on the nearly voiceless Helen and gives her a life she never had in the original stories. She does more than give Helen the face that launched a thousand ships, she gave Helen life: her own life. By psychoanalytically inserting herself into the text, she infuses Helen with a life that she could never have had. This then adds to the overall strength of the retelling, since there is real experience behind the words.  It is in Eidolons that the truth starts to be revealed that H.D. is using Helen as her own Eidolon, but the prose and poetry do not make it immediately evident.  “Yes—Helen is awake, she sees the pattern; the “old pictures” are eternal, the ibis, the hawk, and the hare are painted in bright primary colours. But superimposed on the hieroglyphs is the “marble and silver” of her Greek thought and fanstasy.” (Doolittle 264).  This paragraph shows that Helen, H.D.’s true name, is Helen in the book.  It brings together the pattern, as in the quote. Marble is used perhaps to symbolize how the ideas of the past and the present have intermingled, like the striations of white shot through the smooth black. Being finished with Greek thought and fantasy really brings home the dream like quality of this passage. To the people who knew of H.D. in her life, and followed her, they would be well acquainted with her nuances and friendships, most notably at this point, her friendship to Sigmund Freud, who also likes to analyze dreams, since he believed they were repressed memories, or suppressed desires attached to a libido of the past.  H.D. through this assumption of communal knowledge of her was able to empower Helen in the text.  This is the most powerful tool she used in order to rewrite Helen’s role, and also the role of women in that time, and in her time.  If H.D. instead of being a notable woman at the end of her years was a man, then Helen in Egypt would not have the same power, or might not have any power at all, since they very gender of the author empowered by her own experiences lent the rewriting of the tale an urgency and importance that even in contemporary terms, is a powerful retelling of a woman’s experiences in a world full of men ruled by men.

               H.D.’s new outlook on Helen is a perfectly timed capstone to the Modernist era, since it shows how perspectives should not be overlooked.  There is also a feeling that she is saying something else that lends even more power to her tale. She is saying that art should be appreciated, but just delving into the past and making is present isn’t enough, the comprehension of the ideas needs to evolve with the times as well.  Just as contemporary readers in their own era are going to have to look at her work from their own viewpoints, Helen in Egypt is going to mean something different to an audience of another era. By using her own gender, her own experiences, and taking on the traditional male point of view and giving it a twist that is meaningful in a myriad of ways. H.D. has shown that the traditions of old may be a lesson: Don’t learn everything from them, because there is always another point of view. Sometimes it takes a woman to tell a woman’s story, but everyone should listen.