Water and Rock: lesson’s notes.

The extract is from section five of T. S. Eliot’s The waste land. The section is entitled What the thunder said. The title is referred to an Indian legend of the thunder belonging to the Upanishad (testo sacro indiano). Eliot said that in the fifth section he employed three themes: the journey to Emmaus (località della Palestina legata agli eventi celebrati nella festività cristiana della Pentecoste), the second theme is the approach to the chapel perilous (where is generally said can be found the sacred grail) and the third is referred to eastern Europe decay. To tell the truth the legend of the thunder may also be referred to the vegetation rites.

The first part is made up by the lines from 322 to 394.

The scene narrates of some people who are walking upwards the reach the chapel perilous. The weather is very hot and the people has got sweaty faces. The atmosphere is still a difficult one; the scene is totally built up with an insistent use of the objective correlatives namely water and rock. The people are very hot, they are going up hill and there is a frosty silence: because of the dry and the heat people can not even speak. They can not even breath. There are verbs that give expression to the people’s agony. Reverberation means echo. The only place where people can imagine water is far away.

There is a religious quotation: il tuono richiama il Vangelo di Matteo. There is the same atmosphere of death of The burial of the dead.

Water stands for something to drink; it is a metonymy of baptism, the means through which man can be purified by sins, it symbolizes the need of purification for ones sins. There is the rendering of the hard work people have to make, the reader can feel the hardship of the moving upwards. The distant satisfaction of people’s needs brings to an imaginative situation; even imagine can give them any relief. The possibility exists only in their imagination.

La ricerca del Graal è metafora per la ricerca del senso. The description of the place makes it become a waste land. The idea of the thunder is only imaginative. The faces of the people are compared to animals, to demons. The idea of death is impending and then there is desperate search for water. The repetition of the objective correlative is the negation and the deny of water.

C’è un parallelismo tra la coppa del Graal ed I culti misterici (consumazione del cibo della vita dal dei contenitori). Tutto ciò è legato dai culti della fertilità. Tutto in Eliot è basato su un’intertestualità antropologica e letteraria.

A livello tematico c’è un’unità a livello ideologico, antropologico e narrativo. Sul piano ideologico: l’opera è il documento di una civiltà in crisi, di una generazione in crisi (Eliot dissente). Sul piano antropologico ci sono riferimenti continui al Graal e alla fertilità. Sul piano formale l’unità è data dal piano compositivo musicale: ha una progressione non logica ma emotiva. Analogie con l’arte si hanno con il cubismo. C’è una sfasatura tra il metodo mitico e l’utilizzo allegorico, tra la prima e la seconda parte.