The Downfall of Europe that Hesse is foretelling in his essay reflects upon Dostoyevsky’s The Brother Karamazov. This downfall was illustrated by the Karamazov spirit, which Hesse described as “a rejection of every strong-held Ethic and Moral in favor of a comprehensive laissez-faire.” One of the Karamazovs, Ivan, embodied the epitome of such ideal, turning from a noble man (a European man) into being seduced by this Karamazov state (a Russian man), after his denial of God. He holds that those who recognize a completely new form of truth and who violate the truth of Christ could become the new saint of mankind - “the Grand Magistrate”, which in Hesse’s words, is not unlike Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a form of a god-man. “The Grand Magistrate” fashions a New Ideal, and thus can do virtually anything that is beyond all the old world views and constraints of the conventional law or morality. Ivan Karamazov attempted to live up to this ideal which he has conjured during his “Downfall” from a civilized man, later exercising his “laissez faire“ power as the Grand Magistrate by attempting to destroy the foolish old Karamazov. However, his Hamlet-like nature rendered him hesitant, mind laden by contemplation, as he recognized his right to lay judgment upon others - and himself. Here, Ivan unites the assassin and the judge, the good and the evil, and god and devil in his body, and thus, though paradoxically, transcended the duality. It is in this kind of Downfall, this leap between All and Nothingness by the turn of the century, where Hesse and Eliot both saw infinite possibilities of human arising into the amoral, or super-moral. In this Downfall there lies the potential of a new life.

The Hermit Thrush travels home the earliest in the spring and lingers till the latest in the autumn among all other thrush species. They arrive in the bareness of a pending spring and leave when the land is again leafless in the early autumn, thus witnessing a full cycle of the earth’s growth and decay. Their arrival during the spring brings back the lines of “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs…” in the very beginning of The Waste Land. The return suggests an almost cyclical and recursive poetic quality, like the seasons. Similarly, here, the lines, playing with different combinations of stone and water and ending with “But there is no water,” also constructs a recursive and almost self-enclosed (though perhaps not self-sustained) poetic space.

The image of the thrush also recalls numerous other works in the poetic tradition. In Whitman, the hermit thrush sings a “Song of the bleeding throat, / Death outlet song of life” in a swampy “secluded recess” (the waste land?). Keat’s thrush is “whose only book has been the light / Of supreme darkness” and who “fret not after knowledge”. The darkling thrush of Thomas Hardy’s has “a voice [that] arose among / The bleak twigs overhead,” choosing to “fling his soul / Upon the growing groom.” Robert Frost’s thrush, when singing in the darkness, harbors light of the sun “in a thrush’s breast” and its song. In all the above examples, the thrush experiences life and death, darkness and light, suffering and vitality simultaneously. Those antinomies could hardly be resolved, but the thrush’s ability to embody both of them starkly contrasts with earlier in the poem, the nightingale’s “inviolable voice” in the desert, “’Jug Jug' to dirty ears.” And to quote Eliot’s note, it is interesting how he remarked that “The Nightingales HAVE been something extra this year…and I think the hermit thrush superior on his own habitat.”

How Phlebas the Phoenician “passed the stages of his age and youth” recalls the original epigraph of The Waste Land quoted from Conrad: by the moment of death, Kurtz purportedly “live[d] his life again” and cried “The horror! The horror!” In the facsimile of Section IV, we could find a similar moment where the sailor confronts his pending death, anticipating the horror - “I was / Frightened beyond fear, horrified past horror, calm, / (Nothing was real) for, I thought, now, when / I like, I can wake up and end the dream.” The sweeping statement in parentheses - “Nothing was real” - raises an interesting paradox and is open to interpretation whether the statement is a form of negation or addressing the idea of “nothingness,” yet in either cases the concept of reality is doubted and confounded with illusions. Later, the sailor puts forth another paradoxical statement pertaining to the possibility of knowledge, “I know I know not, / Who only know that there is no more noise now.” The discussion of “nothing” here brings the reader back to the previous section where the maidens were able to “connect nothing with nothing.” However, if nothing is all we have, where could the "connection", something outside of nothingness, reside? These paradoxical musings were succeeded by fire and imageries of burning in Section III. Subsequently in “Death by Water,” the desire for water in “The Fire Sermon” is fulfilled, yet “nothing” - a lack of a quester (for the Grail), of meaning, of hope, continuity, etc. - persists. On the topic of knowledge and perhaps the futile attempt of gaining knowledge, the last sentence of this section, “Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you,” with its didactic tone trying to impart knowledge, now appears ironic.

In Wagner’s Ring Cycle, Part one of the opera opens with the Rhine maiden’s almost ecstatic shriek as they took on the responsibility to guard the Rhine gold: “Weia! Waga! Woge, du Welle! Walla zur Wiege! Wagalaweia! Wallala Weiala weia!”. It could be translated into: “Weia, waga; surge, you wave, float to the cradle! Wagalaweia! Wallala weiala weia!” Among some onomatopoetic, meaningless syllables, words could stilled be discerned as a portrayal of or chant for the river. Here, according to the notes, Eliot quotes a very similar line, yet from the beginning of the last Part in the Ring cycle where the maidens appear for the second time. Only now they have gone through episodes of evil and deception (by skipping the maidens’ first singing, connect to Tiresias’ “foresuffered it all”), lost the gold and longed for a redeeming hero. In mourning, the maidens cry, “Weialala weialala leia leia wallala la la lei la la la lei la la la la la la le” - a completely disjointed version compared to the opening scene, with no meaning whatsoever to be parsed out. However, this part of the singing is delivered in such a way that the loss is veiled by flirtatious and seductive laughters. This forced seduction from female figures echos “A Game of Chess”. Eliot truncated the plot of the Ring cycle at a low point of loss, just as how he has quoted an unresolved scene from Tristan and Isolde previously in Section I. In both references to Wagner, meaning collapses into nothingness. As we read further down the lines “I can connect / Nothing with nothing”, two possible interpretations arise: 1. The despair of nothingness 2. the potential of connection residing in the nothingness. Though the parallel between life/death and meaning/nothing is by no means conclusive, there is great power accumulating as words fall into meaningless pieces, and as multiple figures are rewarded as they die. And then finally, a barely perceived “La! La!”, uttered by the maidens from afar as the narrator of TWL also resolve into silence.

Here, Tiresias speaks in the poem, his voicing echoing Sibyl, Madame Sosostris, and the Tarot deck. By line 242, he again utters a similar line yet in parentheses. Along with the idea of how Tiresias has lived as both man and woman, there is a sense of ventriloquism in his prophetic voice that suggests a kind of vicarious consciousness, which is not different from the experience of modernity, of an individual being devoured by the crowd, and of turning into the disembodied crowd. As Tiresias has exhausted all human miseries of both genders, he not only “foresee[s]” all but also “foresuffer[s]” all. Seeing is rendered an equivalent of suffering. And to in order to suffer from or experience the human condition, you only need to see, suggesting an fatalist futility and anarchy.

This image of acquiring new false teeth immediately reminded me of Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, in which the story culminated with one of the main characters getting a pair of false teeth that beckoned him to a new life. In As I Lay Dying, the false teeth (as Ilene pointed out, traditionally symbols for consumption and speech) was preceded by the death and the burial of the man's wife, his subsequent betrayal of her, and the man's daughter's attempted abortion - man gains voice through the muting of women. Yet in Eliot, this idea is completely subverted. Here, Lil was advised to get false teeth to renew her sexual appeal to her husband; teeth was used as an agency for women to resume voice, only in the form of forced seduction, as if women could not have a voice when it is not in relation to men. Her voice, ironically, transformed into Ophelia's speech before death in the last lines of this section. There is a stark contrast when compared to how Faulkner's male character gained a life after getting teeth and voices.

It is quite surprising to see that there is an uncanny resemblance both formally and thematically between Faulkner 's work and TWL. Faulkner also dealt with themes such as the futility of burial rituals, images such as the disastrous river where water is not necessarily a source of life, the narrative method of using different voices, the presence of prophetic figures (Darl in As I Lay Dying). I wonder if Eliot and Faulkner knew each other's works.

The “unreal city” conceives a sordid palimpsest of post-war London, Baudelaire’s depiction of modernity conjured from urban miseries, Dante’s vestibule to hell, and Battle of Mylae. An inferno rages as the narrator travels through this half-real, half-dream cityscape. Urban life is thus elevated to a mythic experience dominated by phantasmagorias (as defined by Walter Benjamin), in which the cult of novelty is under the sentence of damnation, and the crowd held captive in the disarray of their own creations and discontinuities. This conflation of temporal and spatial dimensions is Eliot’s manipulation of contemporaneity and antiquity as in the Mythic method of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

In The Seven Old Men, Baudelaire’s protagonist “stiffens all [his] nerves” in order to achieve a sense of mock-heroism, which falters immediately as he confronted the apparitions’ absurd monotony and vulgarity. Similarly, as the “I” of The Waste Land inquires from Stetson (who wants to bury the past) about his neither completely dead nor readily living corpse, a response is cut off by the intrusion of a multivalent Baudelaire quote that subverts the author-audience dichotomy. These self-destructive episodes contribute to a fatalistic prospect of modernity.

In the facsimile, the typescript writes "time" instead of "hours". The original "time" rhymes with "nine" in the next line. By changing it to "hours", Eliot seems to be intentionally editing out the rhyme scheme and toning down the sense of order.

Some potential connections between the hyacinth girl and Tristan and Isolde:

In the Hyacinth girl imagery, passage of time could be implied - “first a year ago”, “when we came back, late”. The temporal duration of approximately one year connects to “Hyacinthia”, a festival celebrated annually that comprises of 1. mourning of Hyacinthus’s death, and 2. rejoicing in honor of Apollo. This immediately calls to mind again Weston’s comparative anthropological scholarship - the primitive vegetation/fertility rituals’ similar worship of both the living and the dead. Hyacinthus was killed, reborn into the flower as Apollo instilled life, yet again sealed by the “al, al” notes of grief as a signifier of mourning and death. And such was the state that Eliot describes as “neither living or dead”. However, the Hyacinth girl’s ambiguous relationship with life and death also directly contrasts that of Sibyl’s. Sibyl’s longing for an ultimate death rejects the futile vision of resurrection, while Hyacinth seems to accept the cyclical alteration of seasons, thus building up a garden and some degree of fertility.

Wagner’s opera culminates in Isolde’s joining of Tristan in death. Yet Isolde’s last song transfigures the tragic scene into ecstasy - dying, she arrives at the “utmost rapture” whilst envisioning Tristan’s resurrection. Wagner’s erotic narrative is thence heightened to a paean of love’s sublime power. In The Waste Land, Eliot quotes two parts of the Wagnerian libretto - the opening song (Irish girl, home), and the servant’s forlorn description of the sea (from the beginning of Wagner’s Act III) - presenting a deliberately truncated version of the story where the triumphant consummation hinted at its prospect, yet fails to be ultimately realized.

These two references are both unresolved in their respective selves. And this process Eliot declares as “looking into the heart of light” - a search for resurrection? For faith? For transformation? Then, the two sources intertwined are deemed by the poem as unintelligible or at least unutterable. Their silence echos Ezekiel’s “cannot say” and replaces the various voices put forth by Dickens. I would argue that here and previously, the failure of lingual explanation in delivering a definite resolution inspires the later episode of Madame Sosostris’ tarot cards, where primitive, mythical, and spiritual symbols, creates a self-enclosed system of "fortune" and thus unknowingly "tells".

Ecclesiates 12.4 evokes imageries of the failing almond tree and the burdening grasshopper when man goes on the pilgrimage toward his “long home” - the grave, or death. In the description of the Christian funeral services, on the other hand, shadow is compared to the transient and erratic nature of human life (“All things are more fleeting than a shadow”). Referencing both sources and inviting the audience into this shadow casted upon the waste land, Eliot situates this stanza at the indeterminate edge between life and death. It is where logic and order fail into (or, have always been) “a heap of broken images”, where the prophetic voice of Ezekiel, Son of man, is reduced to “guess[ing]”. The theme of fear from the epigraph resonates and now prepares itself in the dust of a pending burial, which reads almost like a reversal of the fertility ritual ("Come in..."). However, tying this back again to the Christian funeral service text, quoted as “I call to mind the Prophet who cries: I am dust and ashes; and again I meditate among the tombs.” The prophetic figure, part of whom embodied by Ezekiel, simultaneously prophesies, mourns, and lives - in death. Paradoxically, the burial site is rendered a potential site for the living, like April.

Fertility, the waste land, the Fisher King, and other mythic elements are certainly recurring motifs throughout the poem’s entirety, yet Eliot nonetheless characterized these symbolisms as merely “incidental”. Here taking on an editorial voice (is this voice fictional?), Eliot seems to be suggesting that the connection between his poem and Weston’s book is beyond thematic, as ultimately, Eliot’s reference points to Weston’s modern critical study of the Grail legend, instead of the medieval romance itself. This reference to scholarship instead of the original work deserves some further investigation.

In From Ritual to Romance, Weston arrives at her argument that the Grail legend comes from the primitive fertility rituals, which fundamentally challenges the origin of the legend. Her comparative studies are in part de-contextualizing a number of Fisher King and waste land archetypes from their respective cultural practices; and synthesizing these, she arrives at the conclusion. Does this methodology connect with Eliot’s practice of lifting quotations and images from other literary/cultural traditions in The Waste Land, where meanings also reside in the relationship and interaction between each of the sources? What exact nature of Weston’s anthropological scholarship influenced Eliot’s “plan” of the poem? And in what way?

In The Golden Bough, at both the festivals of Adonis and the Egyptian fertility rites for Osiris, the mourning of a declining god and the celebrating of his resurrection take place subsequently if not simultaneously. The cyclical pattern of seasons and nature is also present in The Waste Land in Eliot’s superimposing of decay and rebirth imageries, only that decay lingers, while redemption and promise of life seems to be infinitely deferred - as how the sterile Fisher King and his thus condemned desolate kingdom awaits the quest for the Grail.