Wasteland Modernism E-Book

Rebeca Gualberto Valverde

• Herausgeber: Publicacions de la Universitat de València
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Biblioteca Javier Coy d'Estudis Nord-Americans
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 349

Beschreibung

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.

Leseprobe

BIBLIOTECAJAVIERCOYD’ESTUDIS NORD-AMERICANS

http://puv.uv.es/biblioteca-javier-coy-destudis-nord-americans.html

http://bibliotecajaviercoy.com

DIRECTORA

Carme Manuel

(Universitat de València)

Wasteland Modernism: The Disenchantment of Myth

© Rebeca Gualberto Valverde

1ª edición de 2021

Reservados todos los derechosProhibida su reproducción total o parcial

ISBN: 978-84-9134-844-3ISBN: 978-84-9134-845-0 (ePub)ISBN: 978-84-9134-846-7 (PDF)

Ilustración de cubierta: Sophia de Vera Höltz

Diseño de la cubierta: Celso Hernández de la Figuera

Publicacions de la Universitat de Valènciahttp://[email protected]

Edición digital

Para Juan.And we mean to go on and on and on and on.

Acknowledgements

I cannot express enough gratitude to my friend and mentor Dr. Eduardo Valls Oyarzun for his unwavering support and encouragement since he prompted me to begin this line of research fifteen years ago. I can certify that this book would have never been published without his invaluable assistance, his superlative knowledge, and his unending patience. I would also like to express my sincere thankfulness and deep affection to Dr. Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico, who supervised this project in the early stages and has always offered me her irreplaceable help and continued support. Thank you always for the endless learning opportunities.

The completion of this project could not have been accomplished without the help and friendship of my colleagues Dr. Carmen Méndez and Dr. Laura de la Parra, whose outstanding talent and untiring work ethic always drive me to try harder. I admire them greatly. Thank you also to Dr. José Manuel Losada Goya, for driving forward the studies of myth at Complutense University of Madrid and for giving me the chance to participate in many research activities, projects and exchanges that have undoubtedly enriched my work over the years.

Finally, thank you always to my friends and family. Thank you for your presence and your enthusiasm. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, whose constant support and belief in me has enabled my accomplishments. And, of course, infinite thanks to Juan and to my children. They are a constant source of joy, comfort and pride. This book is all for them.

Contents

Introduction

CHAPTER 1“Shall I at least set my lands in order?”:Post-war Mythopoeia in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

CHAPTER 2“If I could git more into the center of things…”:The End of Life in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer

CHAPTER 3“For a transitory enchanted moment”:The Disillusion of Romance in Francis Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby

CHAPTER 4“A Spectacle with unexplained horrors”:Disenchanted Ritual in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises

CHAPTER 5“The cycle is too cruel”:The Ambivalence of Myth in John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown

CHAPTER 6“Godamercy, they have shot the Holy Grail!”:Mythical Wreckage in Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood

Conclusion

Works Cited

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 literary representation of the myth, as can be observed in modernist texts in the expansion of mythical referents brought about by a myth-ritualistic perspective. The texts retell the story of the Grail adapted to the contextual realities of post-war Europe and America, but the representations of the myth become populated by signifiers of ritual, sacrifice, and vegetation deities; Tarot cards, bullfighting, and sympathetic magic, along with many other symbolic and thematic elements that appeal to ritual mysticism. After the impact of myth-ritualism, at least in the immediate context, it becomes impossible to revise the myth of the Waste Land without addressing an alleged ritual substratum that provides structure and meaning to the romance genre. As will be examined, then, the revision of the myth in modernism will also entail a reassessment of ritual, often revealed as debased and desecrated in the contemporary world.

One last reason this study is theoretically anchored, from a myth-critical perspective, on the myth and ritual school of thought is that this perspective emphasizes the social function of mythology. From the writings of Frazer and Weston transpires the notion that the transcendence of myth resides in its capacity to warrant the community’s survival. This is especially visible in the myth of the Waste Land, which explicitly articulates a need for communal regeneration and political restoration that is, however, undone in the modernist revision of the myth. Understanding the ideological substratum enforced by the meaning of communitarian restoration is thus crucial for a myth-critical analysis of the literature of the period that also coincides with myth-ritualism in placing the mytheme of the Waste Land in the center of the story and assigning to it the core meaning of the tale. From the critical prism of myth-ritualism, the point is neither the magic of the Grail nor how it serves the Fisher King; the point is the inextricable connection between the King and the Waste Land and how the story must unfold so that the land is restored to prosperity. And this perspective elucidates the relevance of the myth in American modernism, given the historical context, which in turn permits a deeper understanding of the ideological function of myth itself.

The modernist representation of the Waste Land myth in the American canon, as will be explored throughout this book, repeatedly emphasizes the Waste Land’s plight over other narrative components of the tale. The effect is the highlighting of a set of political and ideological concerns that connect the social need for a political order to the life forces of nature and cosmology, for the welfare of the land is presented as resulting from the welfare (and rightfulness) of its rulers. Such presupposed correspondence between the natural and the social spheres of human existence entails a legitimizing force of specific power structures, which can then be challenged if the story is rewritten. This study aims to understand how the story is rewritten in a context of collective trauma to reveal how the dominant political and ideological structures of the pre-war status quo are dismantled in modernist literature. It does not consider that myth-ritualism offers a truer or more correct interpretation of mythopoetic thought than other myth-critical schools. As argued, the use of myth-ritualism as a critical framework obeys its decisive influence in the literary representation of the Waste Land myth at the beginning of the twentieth century. This theoretical framework will serve as the backbone for a close reading of the selected corpus to advance a critical hypothesis about the modernist revision of myth. This hypothesis will address the immanence of mythical meanings in literature and the particularities of American modernism in using and reusing myth to articulate a communal narrative of social and historical collapse.

WASTELAND MODERNISM

In his 1962 essay “Where Do We Go from Here? The Future of Fiction,” Saul Bellow describes the literature of modernism as “a dark literature, a literature of victimization, of old people sitting in ash cans waiting for the breath of life to depart” (Taylor “Where?”). A year later, in the lecture Recent American Fiction, he denounces that modern literature “would rather have the maddest chaos it can invoke than a conception of life it has found false” (10). He follows with the question: “But after this destruction, what?” (10). He masterfully answered his own question a year later in the novel Herzog, an experimental, meditative text built upon the ruminations of its protagonist, who seeks to overcome “our contemporary spiritual malady” (Chavkin 326). The novel expresses the author’s “rejection of pessimistic wasteland modernism” (326)—a claim that eloquently introduces a critical subcategory of American modernist literature: wasteland modernism. The term, which critic Allan Chavkin extends to repeatedly refer to the “wastelanders” (327)—meaning American modernist authors—derives directly from Bellow’s novel. Here the protagonist complains that very quickly, “the visions of genius become the canned goods of the intellectuals” (74), citing as an example “the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook” (75). This is regarded as an instance of “weakness” and “cowardice” when addressing a subject as great as “the whole life of mankind” (75), which has, however, become an “unchallenged literary convention” (Chavkin 329) in modern fiction.

The motif of the Waste Land is indeed hugely pervasive in the literature of American modernism. But the present study borrows the term of Herzog’s complaint about ‘wasteland modernism’ to modestly offer an alternative, less disdainful view of this wasteland outlook. For Herzog, wasteland literature is a cliché, canned goods, “a merely aesthetic critique of modernist history” (75). From the perspective of this study, however, the dark literature of modernism deserves renewed critical attention that tackles the process of representation and revision of a myth so emblematic that resulted in the coinage of critical labels such wasteland modernism (Chavkin 326), wasteland writers (French 170), or wastelandism (Kermode 113). Modernist myth-making is not a mask that allows individuals to hide from reality (Chavnik 335). It is a lens to singularly apprehend reality, construct it, and deconstruct it so that, after catastrophe and destruction, new meanings are conceived.

In this regard, and as it partakes post-war modernism, Matthews’ argument about how “American writing of the war was the war” (217) is particularly eloquent. This was a circumstance determined by the distance that separated US soil from the battlefields in Europe and because American troops did not fully participate in military actions until the last year of the conflict (217). Consequently, for a long time, the First World War was an imagined war, a war that “relied on institutions of representation – journalism, print propaganda, fiction, sermons – to make the war real in the place where it was not occurring” (217). On the one hand, this meant that the horror of modern technological warfare was terribly imagined: poison gas, massive shelling, trenches, airplanes used as weapons (217); on the other hand, the lack of first-hand experience of the war led authors such as Edith Warton, for example, to enlarge the war’s capacity for redemption (224). In this view, the war was conceived as a noble fight to preserve the achievements of western civilization against the threat of “materialism, vulgarity, class upheaval, [and] national and personal interest” (226). The reality crash of witnessing and experiencing the carnage, of course, diminished the graciousness of those ideals. Still, it did something worse: it revealed that it was those grand values and institutions that had actually led to the mutilation and killing of millions of human beings. As a result, as Matthews writes, “a generation of writers returned from the war to report that their elders had been mistaken, that the direct experience of war had shaken their confidence in Western faith in progress, reason, technology, and democratic capitalism, and that they would be seeking new artistic ways to express that negative sensibility” (229).

Paraphrasing Bellow, this is the conception of life that was found to be false. Perhaps more strikingly for American citizens who had so actively imagined the war from afar, it is undeniable that, as Hynes famously argued, the First World War was “the great imaginative event” of its time, changing the way men and women thought about the world (XI). It was the ending of something known and knowable (3), and it is such uncertainty that triggers the unmaking of myth explored in this book. The texts analyzed are six works firmly established in the canon of American wasteland modernism: T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), John Steinbeck’s To a God Unknown (1933) and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937). The particularities of the negative sensibility that connects them are a shared process of mythical revision, the commonplaces of the Wasteland outlook that articulate in specific but interconnected voices the collective despair that resulted from the horror of experience and representation of the war. The myth of the Waste Land, rewritten in these texts, is the emblem of a zeitgeist of chaos and violence that counterweighs the modernist paradigm’s fragmentation and uncertainty. A traditional story built around the themes of sickness, sterility, sacrificial death, and the hope of restoration for a land laid waste seems pertinent after western civilization had plunged into the abyss, but modernism demands rupture, disorder, reshaping. The Waste Land is one governing metaphor in the literature of the period, but the story is set out of order, the plot rearranged, the meaning reversed as degeneration imbues the new version of the tale.

The first chapter reassesses T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, clearly the foundational text of wasteland modernism. The aim is to revise, from a myth-critical standpoint, the themes of resurrection and regeneration in the text to elucidate why the restorative ending of the myth of the Waste Land is now construed as an act of cruelty. The chapter explores how modernism manipulates mythopoeia’s principles to replace the eternal recurrence of mythical cosmogony with a literary artefact that rewrites and reshapes myth to convenience to represent the chaos and horror of contemporary reality. Eternal recurrence becomes corrupt when the awakening of a new life cycle only entails an ongoing resurgence of death, sickness, and despair.

Such are also the conditions of life in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, examined in the second chapter of this book. In Dos Passos’s text, Manhattan is a contemporary Waste Land, a mythical landscape of frustration and mechanization that operates symbolically, extending a somehow realist representation of life in the modern city to portray the broader forces of alienation and dehumanization that characterize the post-war zeitgeist. In Manhattan, the citizens are trapped, sick, inanimate, dismembered by the modern megalopolis machine, but the mythical dimension of the novel presents a modern Waste Land from which there is no outside, no salvation. The socio-political order of traditional mythology has no place in a city that works as the emblem of hopelessness, of a time and place when individuals cannot ever restore back to life a community for whom the only chance for survival is their loss of humanity.

The third chapter of the study also looks towards New York City, as it revisits F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, The Great Gatsby. In particular, the analysis presented probes the mythical artifacts of the novel to reveal how the mythological tradition of the Waste Land imbricates with the foundational mythology of the United States in a text that turns myth upside down. The ruling principles of traditional mythography provide order and meaning as they are bound to, but the new order is unexpected, and the meaning has been drastically changed. Such is the inevitable consequence of the superimposition of pre-modern myth and American mythopoeia. As will be examined, it results in the configuration of a sort of antiromance that tells the story of a mythical land of plenty that has now become a Waste Land with no hopes of restoration. But as it happened with London in The Waste Land, Manhattan in Manhattan Transfer, and the whole of America in The Great Gatsby, the sense of place in these texts is expansive, not reductive. The Waste Land is not a place, but the spirit of the times.

This is the reason why the Waste Land accompanies the expatriate protagonists of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in their voluntary exile, as is explored in the fourth chapter of this study. The novel’s characters are all sick, bored, anguished as they drift from one wasteland to another, somehow gravitating around the novel’s Fisher-King figure, Jake Barnes. There is no hope for salvation for any of them, no primitive ritual that can restore their health. There is only a shape of temporary comfort, whether sensual or aesthetic, that can do nothing to appease the overwhelming frustration that emanates from the very conditions of life in the Waste Land. The Waste Land is not Spain, is not Paris, is not America or Europe. It is life after the war, enduring the absence of what the war took away: the meaning, the purpose, and the hopes of an entire form of civilization.

These are the wasteland novels that chronicled the decade after the war, “the Waste Land years of the 1920’s” (French 170). They use myth to provide order, to construct meaning, but, in their task to rewrite myth, they open it up for dissection, they pull it apart, they offer the chance for dismantlement. John Steinbeck inherits the paradigm and begins to transform it in To a God Unknown, analyzed in chapter five. Steinbeck’s novel receives the tradition of revising myth and takes it one step further. The presentation of myth becomes ambivalent, the meaning, fluid, and malleable. The result is the refutation of mythical meaning itself executed through a straightforward representation that confounds life and death, sickness and health, rebirth and condemnation.

The continuum of meaning with the nineteen-twenties’ novels is clear, but the texture of myth is more elastic, more translucent, and less durable. In light of this study, this is the ultimate expression of the post-war mentality: the loss of solid, reliable meanings attached to the stories that used to shape up the world. Perhaps, the clearest example of this phenomenon is Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1937), which is discussed in the last chapter of this book. Barnes’s novel inspects the wounds, bursts outs despair, and in a way offers a possibility of closure for the modernist manipulation of myth. That closure is not redemption. It is not the restitution of the old world. It is not the establishment of a new order. It is the end of the mourning of myth. It is the recognition and acceptance of the limitations of a dominant narrative to provide one monolithic meaning that can explain and justify a hierarchy of values and a set of social structures that led the world into, in the words of Henry James, an “abyss of blood and darkness” (qt. in Fussell 8).

1 Calinescu writes that during the nineteenth century a split occurred between modernity as stage in history and modernity as an aesthetic concept (41). Historical modernity, dating from the early Renaissance, is best characterized by “the doctrine of progress, the confidence in the beneficial possibilities of science and technology (…), the cult of reason, and the ideal of freedom defined within the framework of an abstract humanism, but also the orientation toward pragmatism and the cult of action and success” (41). “Cultural modernity” is however defined by its “consuming negative passion” (42) and its disgust for the middle-class values celebrated in the modern age. Ramply locates this stage in the history of ideas in the philosophy of nineteenth-century thinkers such as Marx,

Simmel, Webber, Baudelaire, or Nietzsche, for whom this was “a decisive moment in the history of western culture, when its values are revealed to be hollow illusions and thereby lose all legitimacy” (Rampley 2).

2 The use of the term ‘Waste Land’ myth rather ‘Grail myth’ or ‘Fisher King myth’ throughout this study is explained later in this introduction. In order to clarify the matter of capitalization however, it should be noted that the form ‘Waste Land’ will be capitalized when used to refer either to the myth itself, or to the constituent mytheme, as it will be also the case with other mythemes such as Grail, Knight, or even occasionally Quest. The forms ‘waste land’ and ‘wasteland’ will be used indifferently to refer to literal wasted lands depicted in the texts examined along this study. Of course, no capitalization will be used either if discussing specific representations of knights, grails or quests in the analysed texts.

3 Some relevant studies in this line of criticism are Lupack and Lupack’s King Arthur in America (1999), Olderman’s Beyond The Waste Land. The American Novel in the Nineteen-Sixties (1972). References to the ‘wasteland literature’ of American modernism also appear in the classic writings of Kermode (1987) and French (1975).

4 Goetnick has carefully traced the many theories of origin for the myth of the Grail: ancient fertility cults, Christian rituals, Jewish rituals, Celtic mythology, Arabian tales and Indo-European legends. He has come to the conclusion that, in new of the numerous authors and the volume of material, it is only possible to indicate currents and provide bibliography for the different theories (119). The theory of origin summarized in this study is the dominant version argued by scholars such as Loomis (1992) and Carey (2007).

5 Among the prototypes for the Grail found by Loomis, two are specially significant: the dish of Rhydderch (one of the Thirteen Treasures of the Island of Britain the power of which was that “whatever food one wished thereon was instantly obtained” (Loomis 58)) and a vessel in possession of Brân the Blessed, the Welsh counterpart of the Fisher King in the Mabinogion whose court of immortal knights feasted endlessly for eighty years (59). Even though today it is highly contested that, as Loomis’s claimed, the mistranslation of ‘horn’ into ‘body’ (both li cors in their Old French nominative forms) would explain the representation of the Grail as containing the Corpus Christi in the romances following Chrétien (Loomis 60-61), the need for such an argument illustrates the radical transformation undergone by the Grail myth already in the Middle Ages: what seems in origin a pagan talisman of plenty, quickly transformed into the sacred container of the Holy Body of Jesus Christ.

6 The explicit transformation of the mystical Grail into the Holy Chalice, a sacred relic from Christ’s passion, is found in Robert de Boron’s Joseph d’Arimathie, dated from soon after de Troyes‘s

composition of Perceval. Carey hypothesizes that, “having been struck (and perhaps disturbed) by Chrétien’s description of the ‘so holy thing’, Robert set out to account for the Grail’s origin and nature—situating in this time unequivocally within the framework of sacred history, as the fragmentary account in the Conte del Graal had conspicuously failed to do” (138).

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