This same divan or bed

Tiresias, Ovid and The Waste Land

In his own Notes on The Waste Land, TS Eliot claims that his representation of the blind prophet Tiresias is central to an understanding of the poem.  Indeed, the character is literally central, being introduced in line 218, almost exactly halfway through the poem. Eliot informs us:

Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character', is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest…What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

As is often the case with Eliot’s Notes, this raises as many questions as it answers. What, for example, is the precise difference between a personage and a character? In what way is Tiresias, who has a first-person speaking part (and I Tiresias have foresuffered all…) not a character?

At face value, Eliot’s words imply that the voices of the poem are in some way all aspects of Tiresias; or perhaps that Tiresias represents everyman/everywoman. There are Eliot experts, however, who hold that Eliot’s Notes are either deliberately obscure, or mischievously misleading: his comments on Tiresias, for example, are supported by nineteen lines of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, for which he provides neither a translation nor a proper citation.

Before addressing the issue of Tiresias’ role in the poem, let us look at his story in ancient mythology: we may as well begin with the quotation from Ovid. Jupiter, king of the gods, has partaken a bit too freely of the nectar, and teases his wife, Juno, about sexual pleasure:

-Let’s be frank. You ladies enjoy it more than we men do.

-Absolute rubbish, Juno replied. So they agreed to consult an expert, Tiresias: he had sexual experience from both perspectives.

(The story goes that Tiresias had been walking in a green wood when he saw a pair of snakes mating; he separated them by smacking them hard with his walking stick. Miraculously, he was changed from man to woman, and remained female for seven years. Then he saw the snakes again, and thought, if a stroke of my stick was enough to cause a sex change, maybe the same thing will happen again… So he struck those self-same serpents with his stick and his manhood was restored.)

Tiresias, appointed umpire to the gods’ battle of the sexes, gave the thumbs-up to Jupiter; Juno took this decision very badly, to the point of irrationality: she cursed the referee with blindness. Gods can’t undo what other gods do, so Jupiter tried to make it up to Tiresias by giving him the power of prophecy.

Metamorphoses Book III, lines 318-336

This, incidentally, is not the only story Eliot plunders from Metamorphoses, which as the title suggests, is a verse encyclopaedia of mythical and legendary transformations, from the Creation to the apotheosis of Caesar: Eliot’s Notes also point us to a gruesome and disturbing tale in Book VI. King Tereus of Thrace becomes obsessed with his wife’s sister, Philomela, whom he rapes and mutilates, cutting out her tongue so she cannot tell what has been done to her. She does however succeed in communicating with her sister, Procne, by means of a tapestry. The two sisters take their revenge by killing Tereus’ son, and feeding the barbecued boy to his father. When he discovers the horrible truth, Tereus pursues the sisters with a sword, until the gods transform the women into a nightingale and a swallow, and the king into a hoopoe.

When this image first appears in The Waste Land (part II, A Game of Chess) it seems somewhat shoe-horned in: the change of Philomel, by the barbarous king/ So rudely forced is a feature of the décor of the room in which we find a neurotic women and an uncommunicative man. An image of rape and murder seems rather over-the-top in the context of Eliot’s depiction of middle class angst, even if intended as ironic exaggeration. But everything in The Waste Land is there for a purpose, and in this case it anticipates a fragmentary reappearance in one of the most abstruse sections of part III, The Fire Sermon:

O the moon shone bright on Mrs Porter

And on her daughter

They wash their feet in soda water

Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole!

Twit twit twit

Jug jug jug jug jug jug

So rudely forc’d.

Tereu

The Fire Sermon takes it title from the Buddha’s discourse on liberation from suffering. Suffering is caused by desire; the senses and the mind are on fire, burning with lust, anger or delusion. The wise person rejects the domination of the senses; the removal of sensual desires results in the removal of anguish and suffering. Eliot’s initially obscure juxtaposition of a soldiers’ song, a line from a French sonnet, and onomatopoeic birdsong, illustrates the Buddha’s message.

The section begins with a bowdlerized version of an obscene song, popularised by Australian soldiers in the Great War: Mrs Porter and her daughter were sex workers, making their living from the physical desires of their military clientele; it ends with the calls of the swallow and the nightingale, reminders of Ovid’s tragic tale of lust and violence. The meat in this sandwich is the poet Verlaine’s response to the final scene of Wagner’s music drama, Parsifal: And oh! These children’s voices, singing in the dome! Parsifal, Grail knight and redeemer of the Fisher King character, has become wise through compassion for others and the rejection of physical temptations. In Parsifal, the imagery of Arthurian legend is conflated with Buddhist asceticism: Eliot contrasts Parsifal’s spirituality with the fleshliness of Mrs Porter and the disastrous lust of Tereus.

One more Ovid connection before returning to Tiresias. One of the major themes of The Waste Land, cultural and moral decline, is also the starting point of Metamorphoses: Book I, lines 89-150 describe the Four Ages, beginning with the Golden Age, an era without war or crime, and ending in the current Time of Iron, in which violence and greed prevail: in search of profit, men first set sail on the ocean: like the unfortunate Phlebas the Phoenician in the Death by Water section of The Waste Land.

Naughty snakes

Tiresias makes his appearance in part III of The Waste Land, The Fire Sermon, the theme of which is casual or loveless sex and the suffering which is caused by sensual desire. The blind prophet, old man with wrinkled female breasts, watches as a typist returns to her dingy flat, heats some tinned food and has uninvolved sex with her boy friend. Tiresias notes that, as both man and woman, he has been here before, the implication being that such scenes have been repeated since time immemorial:

And I Tiresias have foresuffered all

Enacted on this same divan or bed;

I who have sat by Thebes below the wall

And walked amongst the lowest of the dead…

Tiresias’ earliest appearance in classical literature is Book XI of the Odyssey, at which point he is already dead. Odysseus visits Tiresias in the Underworld, hoping to get advice on how to get home to Ithaca. In return for a drink of sheep’s blood (which the Dead apparently find very more-ish) Tiresias informs him that he and his crew can return home safely, but only if they do not harm any cattle they find grazing on the island of Thrinacia. In the terms of epic narrative, this is the equivalent of a sign saying WET PAINT DO NOT TOUCH: we know that the innocent cattle of Helios are going to end up on a spit. And so it proves: because they failed to heed Tiresias’ prophecy, their ship is destroyed, and all except Odysseus are drowned. Although he survives this time, Odysseus has been informed by the prophet that his death will “come from the sea,” which is fulfilled (though not in the Odyssey) in peculiar manner when he is killed by a spear made from a stingray.

Tiresias’ antehumous residence was the city of Thebes, setting of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Through a series of unlikely circumstances, Oedipus unwittingly killed his father and married his mother. When Thebes is hit by plague, believed to be divine punishment for the murder of the king, Oedipus calls on the local prophet to help him identify the guilty party. Tiresias, knowing the truth, tells Oedipus that it would be better to leave well alone; Oedipus becomes angry at his refusal to co-operate, and insults the old man, resulting in Tiresias revealing the truth and warning the king that he will be destroyed if he persists in ignoring his words. Which of course comes to pass.

Tiresias completes a hat-trick of rejected advice in the third of the Theban trilogy, Antigone. Oedipus’ successor as king, Creon, forbids Antigone from burying the body of her brother, who has died in Thebes’ civil war. Tiresias warns Creon that his act of vengeance has angered the gods, and that he will lose his own son if he does not change his ways. Creon heaps abuse on the blind seer, then changes his mind, but too late: his son, his wife and his stepdaughter take their own lives because of his actions.

The story of Tiresias’ own death is related in Apollodorus: when the Thebans were defeated in war, he advised the evacuation of the city: when they had come by night to the spring called Tilphussa, Tiresias drank of it and expired: another death by water.

Virgil points out the absolute state of these guys...

Dead Tiresias makes a return to the canon of western literature in Dante’s Inferno Canto XX, where he inhabits the fourth pit of the Eighth Circle of Hell, prison of sorcerers and false prophets. He shares with his daughter Manto, and the astrologers Guido Bonatti and Michael Scot –the only Scottish inhabitant of Hell, with the possible exception of Pontius Pilate.  The punishment for these miscreants is to have to walk around with one’s head on backwards, such that the tears they weep dribble down into the crack of one’s buttocks, (or sheugh o’ the erse, as Michael Scot would have put it): those who pretended while alive that they could see into the future, are condemned after death to look forever behind them.

So what about the “personage” of Tiresias in The Waste Land? According to the Notes, all the men and women in the poem are effectively united in the figure of Tiresias, and the substance of the poem itself is Tiresias’ vision. If, as Eliot maintains, he is not a “character,” we may assume that he is the voice of the poet himself, or rather the voice of the poetic imagination that has created the other characters. Eliot is reputed to have described his poem, half-jokingly, as “just a piece of rhythmical grumbling”: like Sophocles’ Tiresias, he grumps at a world that ignores his warning to behave differently or face disaster; and like Dante’s, he casts his glance backwards, not to a Golden Age, but to the long history of human folly.

The Sibyl, "The Waste Land" and Hollywood

Σιβυλλα τι θελεις;… αποθανειν θελω*

Sibyl, what do you want? … I want to die.

At the end of the last post, we looked at this quotation from Petronius’ Satyricon, which is featured in the epigraph of The Waste Land. In this post (dedicated to my Advanced Higher English class) we will have a closer look at the Sibyl, and the theme of prophets and prophecy in the first part of the poem, The Burial of the Dead. Along the way there will be a slight digression onto the subject of my favourite TS Eliot-related film.

Sibyls (sibyllae), or prophetic priestesses of Apollo, were to be found in various locations in the ancient world. The most significant in Roman legend was the Sibyl of Cumae, who turned up at the door of Tarquinius Superbus, the last king of Rome, in the form of an old woman. She offered to sell him nine books of prophecies, which she claimed would provide valuable advice whenever the city of Rome found itself in danger. The Sibyl’s asking price was too much for the king, however, and he declined the offer; whereupon the Sibyl threw three of the books onto the throne room’s fire, and asked for the same price for the remaining six. Tarquinius was, unsurprisingly, even less inclined to part with the cash; the Sibyl then lobbed another three volumes into the flames, maintaining her original price, but now for only a third of the goods.**

Lucretia

Never play poker with a man called Doc, or argue with a Sibyl. His bluff called, Tarquinius cracked and agreed to purchase the three remaining books at the full RRP. Although the books did apparently prove useful to Rome throughout the coming centuries, they did not help King Tarquin the Proud very much: not only was he a poor poker player, he was also a thoroughly bad egg (the clue is in the name, perhaps); he was driven out of Rome after forcing himself on Lucretia, the wife of a Roman nobleman; ironically, he died in exile at Cumae. The monarchy had lost its authority, and kings were no longer welcome: Rome became a republic - for five hundred years, anyway.

According to Ovid, Metamorphoses XIV, 101 ff. the Cumaean Sibyl had become a grumpy old woman as a result of an incident involving Apollo. She explains to Aeneas that she had been propositioned by the god, who had asked her to name her own price for her affections:

ego pulveris hausti
ostendens cumulum, quot haberet corpora pulvis,
tot mihi natales contingere vana rogavi;
excidit, ut peterem iuvenes quoque protinus annos.

I pointed to a pile of dust, and stupidly asked that the number of my birthdays should equal the specks of the dust; but I failed to ask that I should stay youthful.

The Sibyl's Cave, Cumae

So the Sibyl was destined to live for a thousand years: and without the benefit of L’Oreal or Olay, she wrinkled and withered away until she was so tiny she could live inside a jar:  which was where Trimalchio claimed to have seen her in the 1^st Century CE. Exhausted by unnatural old age, and having witnessed centuries of the follies of mankind, her only wish was to be allowed to die.

So in choosing this text as the epigraph to The Waste Land, TS Eliot was perhaps suggesting that as a poet/prophet (the Latin word vates means both) he shared the Sibyl’s ennui and general world-weariness. At the ripe old age of thirty-four, Tom Eliot is figuratively sick to death of the twentieth century.

Petronius had not been his first pick for the epigraph: the early drafts were headed by a quotation from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

“Did he live his life again in every detail of desire, temptation, and surrender during that supreme moment of complete knowledge? He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision, – he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath –
"The horror! The horror!"

These are the last words of Kurtz, a highly intelligent and well-intentioned European who has come to Congo to export ivory, but allows himself to worshipped as a god by an African tribe, and has taken part in their gruesome rituals. He appears to the narrator to have gone insane.

The meaning of this quotation is not dissimilar to the words of the Sibyl: Kurtz has witnessed such horrors that he is ready to die; he is, like the Sibyl, at least partly responsible for his own predicament.

Eliot was persuaded by the unofficial editor of The Waste Land, Ezra Pound, that Conrad was not sufficiently “weighty” as a writer to provide the introduction to the poem. According to his widow, Eliot regretted his decision to drop Conrad; he later went some way to making amends by citing another quotation from Heart of Darkness as the epigraph of The Hollow Men.

The Waste Land and Heart of Darkness were, incidentally, reunited half a century later in the form of Francis Coppola’s war movie masterpiece Apocalypse Now (1979).  The action of Conrad’s novella is transferred to Vietnam, where Kurtz is a renegade American colonel who is worshipped as a god by an irregular army of indigenous people. The US Army High Command believes him to be insane, and sends a special forces captain, Willard, upriver with orders to assassinate him.

Coppola conflates Conrad’s tale with the Fisher King imagery of The Waste Land: in the Arthurian legend which gives the poem its title, the land is barren because its king is sickly and weak; in Apocalypse Now, the “insane” Kurtz is a symbol of the madness destroying Vietnam.

Whether Kurtz is truly insane, or is in fact the only character who offers a clear analysis of the war, by the end of the movie he, like the Sibyl, wants to die. Rather than be cured by the questing knight, Willard, he is killed by him. We are reminded of an earlier Italian version of the myth which links the strength of the king with the land he rules: that of the Rex Nemorensis, the King of the Wood, in which continued fertility requires human sacrifice:

The Golden Bough, JMW Turner

 In this sacred grove there grew a certain tree round which at any time of the day, and probably far   into the night, a grim figure might be seen to prowl. In his hand he carried a drawn sword, and he kept peering warily about him as if at every instant he expected to be set upon by an enemy. He was a priest and a murderer; and the man for whom he looked was sooner or later to murder him and hold the priesthood in his stead. Such was the rule of the sanctuary. A candidate for the priesthood could only succeed to office by slaying the priest, and having slain him, he retained office till he was himself slain by a stronger or a craftier.

                                                                                          JG Frazer, The Golden Bough, chapter 1

Just in case we don’t make the connection, while Kurtz awaits his end, he recites The Hollow Men, and reads Frazer’s The Golden Bough and Jessie L Weston’s From Ritual to Romance, both of which are cited by Eliot as formative influences on The Waste Land.

The Golden Bough takes its title from the wood of a tree in the “sacred grove” which the would-be priest would have to break off before attempting to kill the incumbent. This sacred wood also has a connection with the Sibyl: when, in Virgil’s Aeneid VI, Aeneas wishes to visit his late father in the Underworld, he is told by the Sibyl that it’s easy to get there, not so simple to come back; only the golden bough of a magical tree will provide him with a return ticket on Charon’s ferry.

In addition to acting as tour guide to the Underworld, the Sibyl also offers Aeneas a number of prophetic observations, including a vision of war:

...bella, horrida bella
et Thybrim multo spumantem sanguine cerno

 I see war, terrible war, and the River Tiber foaming with much blood'

  Virgil, Aeneid VI 86-87

(Incidentally, these lines, or a mistranslation of them, are probably Britain’s best-known Virgilian verses, having become a sort of shorthand for anti-immigration politics and predictions of disaster.)

The prophetic imagery of the epigraph continues into the first part of The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead:

And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.            The title, The Burial of the Dead, is taken from a rite in the Book of Common Prayer; dust, as in ashes to ashes, dust to dust, symbolises what will become of us after death; but here the dust is also an allusion to the legend of the Sybil, where it paradoxically symbolises life, even if it is a long, painful and undesired life. There is also a passing reference to a biblical prophet, Ezekiel: Son of man,   You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images In the Old Testament, the phrase son of man frequently refers to Ezekiel, who has a vision of a Valley of Dry Bones. Perhaps Eliot sees himself as the prophet/poet, confronted by the disarticulated bones of his poem? The prophecy imagery now turns to the Madame Sosostris, the Tarot reading, horoscope delivering, clairvoyante; who, despite her various abilities to tell the future, was unable to predict a common cold. Through his ironical depiction of this psychic fraud with her wicked pack of cards, Eliot seems to suggest that his credulous twentieth century society is debased even in its choice of prophets. Nevertheless, Madame Sosostris’ Tarot cards predict a number of characters who will feature elsewhere in The Waste Land. In the next blogpost we will look at the central role of the prophet Tiresias in the poem. *   Footnote 1: Transliterated,  Sibylla, ti theleis?... Apothanein thelo ** Footnote 2: In The Godfather Part II, the Sibyl’s uncompromising negotiating strategy is adopted in reverse by Michael Corleone. Faced with a demand for a huge bribe in return for a gaming licence, Michael’s (ultimately successful) counter-offer is less than nothing. The film was directed by…Francis Coppola.

Donald Trump's Roman predecessor

The multi-millionaire businessman is holding a lavish dinner party at his luxury home. He returns to the table after a lengthy visit to the restroom:

Folks – excuse me folks! – my bowels have been a little low-energy these last couple days. Doctors, all the doctors, did their thing, couldn’t find a cure. But I invented my own medicine! I’m a smart person, really smart. Otherwise my stomach, it’d be growling like a bull for sure. A bull! So lemme just tell you, if any of you people gotta, you know, go, just, like, go.  No need to be embarrassed, folks. Just do it! We all get gas. Let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than keeping it in. And the Lord God Almighty would agree with me on that one. Seriously. Even if you gotta pass gas during dinner, go right ahead, I won’t stop you! I have the best doctors, that say don’t, don’t hold it in. Very unhealthy! If you need to take a dump, though, you can go outside to the restroom! But gas, it rises up to your brain and then infects the rest of your body. Believe me. I personally have known people, many, many people that died because they didn’t take that advice. Sad!

Remind you of anyone?

This is a loose translation of the words of Trimalchio, the great comic character in Petronius’ 1^st Century CE Roman novel known as The Satyricon. Returning recently to the Cena Trimalchionis (Trimalchio’s Dinner Party) episode, I was struck by the similarities between Trimalchio and a certain candidate for Leadership of the Free World. This ignorant buffoon (Trimalchio, that is) has come from humbler origins, though: he is a libertus, a freedman or former slave; his Semitic name suggests that his family came to Italy from the Middle East. Likewise, Donald Trump’s name betrays his own immigrant origins, his family having sailed west from Scotland (we’re sorry about that, world).

Trimalchio is vulgar, rude, crude, boorish, boastful, ostentatious and completely devoid of taste. He is also fabulously wealthy, having made his money in import/exports: I was once like you guys, he tells his guests, but I was tough enough to get where I am now. Guts is what you need, the rest is bullshit. Buy low, sell high, that’s my motto. (Satyricon 75)

Fellini's Satyricon

He is not deliberately insulting his guests; he simply lacks empathy or any capacity to weigh the effect of his words on the sensitivities of his audience.  Indeed, earlier in the night he has unwittingly offended his friends while, to his mind, he is showing them respect:

verum Opinianum praesto. heri non tam bonum posui, et multos honestiores cenabant.

This is the finest vintage wine you’re drinking. I didn’t serve such good wine last night, and the guests were much higher class. (Sat. 34)

Occasionally there is flash of genuine wit in Trimalchio’s table talk, but even then it is put in the service of self-aggrandisement. When a guest begins a story with the words, there was once a poor man and a rich man… Trimalchio interrupts: quid est pauper? What’s a poor man?

Another trait shared by Trump and Trimalchio is their insistence on emphasising that what they are telling you is the truth: believe me is a favourite phrase of both:

Credite mihi, assem habeas, assem valeas

Believe me, if a penny is all you’ve got, a penny is all you’re worth (Sat. 77).

A variation of this assertion of truth is scis tu me non mentiri (you know I’m not lying) from Trimalchio; there will be no lies from Trump at the RNC. I will leave it to the reader to consider why trustworthy characters would feel the need to remind their audiences of their honesty quite as often as they do; a kind psychologist might interpret it as evidence of an inferiority complex, the certainty of their opinions being over-compensation for deep ignorance. Trimalchio talks about his antique collection: I’m the only guy on earth that owns genuine Corinthian plate…I’m not an ignoramus, I know that Corinthian metal was invented when that slippery customer Hannibal captured Troy… (Sat. 50)

He is apparently unaware that this is a complete mishmash of Roman history and Greek legend, just as Trump is sure there are no Russians in Ukraine.

Trump’s own ignorance apparently includes a belief in superstitions. He is said to throw salt over his shoulder at meals, and believes in lucky golf balls. It is not known if he believes in astrology, as Trimalchio certainly does. He explains the various traits of the Signs of the Zodiac to his guests: I was born under Cancer the Crab, so I have lots of legs to stand on, and many possessions on land and sea, for either one suits a crab. Incidentally, The Donald was born under Gemini: Trimalchio explains that the sign of the Heavenly Twins is associated with a pair of horses, two yolked oxen, people who want it both ways, and guys with big bollocks (Sat. 39).

And on that subject, rather than further desperate hammering of the relevance of Latin literature to current issues, let us now break for a short quiz on the sexual boasts and creepiness of our two heroes. Quaero: who said the following, Trump or Trimalchio?

1.  If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women…

2.  I always succeeded in getting my mistress off – you all know what I mean. I’ll say no more because I don’t wanna boast.

3.  You should see my wife dance – believe me, nobody knows her way round a pole like she does. 
4.  Don’t you think my daughter’s hot? She’s hot, right?

Check your answers at the end.

We have probably had quite enough points of comparison between Trimalchio and the GOP's unlikely candidate. What of the differences? Well, apart from the fact that they are jokes separated by 2000 years, it strikes me that Trimalchio, for all he is a buffoon, never makes a deliberately racist comment. Oh, and unlike Trump, Trimalchio is bald…

Any readers who care about the avowed intent of this blog will by this time be thinking, is this not just an opportunity for a cheap shot at an easy target? What happened to the bit about “classical references in modern literature”?

Well, before that, an interesting story about the author of the Satyricon, Gaius (or maybe Titus) Petronius. Our Petronius was arbiter elegantiae, or style consultant and confidant, to the emperor Nero; he may well also have been a consul in 62 CE. Unfortunately, he got on the wrong side of Tigellinus, prefect of Nero’s Praetorian Guard, and was obliged to commit suicide after being threatened with arrest on trumped-up charges of treason.

Makovsky, Death of Petronius

The historian Tacitus relates that Petronius attempted to plead his case in person to Nero, who was on a visit to Campania. Petronius got no further than Cumae, where he realised that the game was up. Rather than get his death over with quickly, however, Petronius decided rather to check out in his own good time and on his own terms. He invited some friends round, then opened his veins, but would bandage them up again if the conversation seemed to be getting interesting. He then had dinner, rewarded some of his slaves and ordered that others be flogged. Before he died, he composed a full account of Nero’s sexual activities, together with a list of his male and female partners, which he then sent to the Emperor.

But to return to Petronius’ modern literary connections. Our own comparison with Trump is not the first time Trimalchio has been associated with an ostentatious nouveau riche American. F Scott Fitzgerald’s draft titles for The Great Gatsby included Trimalchio and Trimalchio in West Egg. He was eventually persuaded that the reference was too obscure for the reading public; but apparently he later regretted dumbing the title down. If he had stuck to his guns, might we have seen Baz Luhrmann’s  Trimalchio starring Leonardo DiCaprio, I wonder?

Trimalchio’s best known appearance in modern literature, however, is as the speaker in the epigraph of the most important poem in 20^th Century English literature: TS Eliot’s The Waste Land.

“Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi
in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σιβυλλα
τι θελεις; respondebat illa: αποθανειν θελω.”

In actual fact I saw the Sibyl at Cumae with my own eyes hanging in a bottle, and when the boys said to her, Sibyl, what do you want? She would reply: I want to die (Sat. 48).

There were a number of Sibyls, or female prophets, in antiquity. The most important to the Romans was the Sibyl of Cumae, whom Trimalchio here drunkenly claims to have met. The story is that the god Apollo fell in lust with her, and offered to grant her any wish in return for her favour. She asked to live for as many years as the grains of sand she held in her hand; but unfortunately neglected to request eternal youth and health to go along with her long life. Accordingly, as she got older she withered away physically to such an extent that she could be kept inside a bottle; in the end, only her voice remained. It’s an odd coincidence that Cumae, where the world-weary Sibyl couldn’t die, is the same place Petronius chose to end his own life.

So what is the relevance of the epigraph to The Waste Land? Does the poet see himself (or his persona) as a weary prophet, waiting for death? More about prophecy and The Waste Land in the next post. 

Chiasmic quiz solution: 1. Trump, 2. Trimalchio (Sat. 75), 3. Trimalchio (Sat. 52), 4. Trump.

Wheels within wheels

Fortuna, Ixion and King Lear

In the last post we visited Tartarus, the classical hell, and met a few of its inhabitants: notably Ixion, former king of the Lapiths in Thessaly. Readers will recall that Ixion’s big mistake was to abuse the hospitality of Zeus by attempting to seduce his wife, Hera. His lustful intentions were however discovered, and Ixion was tricked by Zeus into having sex with a cloud instead. The cloud later gave birth to the race of the centaurs; Ixion was punished for his hubris by being bound to a revolving wheel of fire in Tartarus.

Why this form of punishment specifically? Some commentators see in the wheel of Ixion the vestiges of a more ancient sun-god myth; others, including Robert Graves, suggest that the fire was a later addition, and put more emphasis on the crucifixion aspect of Ixion’s torture. Some suggest that the wheel is symbolic of the eternal nature of his punishment.

Across centuries and cultures, wheels have symbolised destructive power, whether they are attached to a mighty Juggernaut or are little and green; the most common allusion to the wheel in medieval and early modern literature, however, is in the form of The Wheel of Fortune, or Rota Fortunae. It is an allegory of the inexorable workings of fate, a metaphor which explains in simple terms the vicissitudes of the human condition: you may be a king today, but tomorrow you could find yourself on a storm-lashed heath without a crown or even an umbrella. As the cowboy said, sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you. The goddess Fortuna sometimes gives the wheel a bit of a spin, changing your luck for better or worse. When, in King Lear, Kent finds himself humiliatingly condemned to the stocks, he calls upon Fortune to Smile once more. Turn thy wheel… (Lear II, 2, 167).

Fortuna has traditionally been personified as a fickle woman: from comparison with the inconstant moon in Carmina Burana’s O Fortuna velut luna; to Frank Loesser’s Luck be a Lady: A lady doesn’t wander all over the room/ and blow on another guy’s dice. In Macbeth, Fortune is described as acting like a rebel’s whore; in Antony and Cleopatra she is a false housewife; in Hamlet, she is a strumpet, and the subject of a somewhat contrived dirty joke: on being asked how they are doing, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that they are neither at the top of Fortune’s cap, nor at her shoes. When Hamlet obligingly offers the feed line: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours? Guildenstern delivers the punchline, Faith, her privates we, doubtless thinking back of the net.

Back in Lear, the revolving wheel is obvious in the relationship of the half-brothers Edgar and Edmund: at the beginning of the play, the illegitimate son Edmund is aggrieved at his comparatively low status and the obvious contempt of his father, Gloucester; he contrives the exile of his legitimate brother and the downfall of his father, with the aim of inheriting his wealth and power. Edmund is now at the zenith, and Edgar at his nadir: Fortune spins once more, however, and when Edmund is mortally wounded by his brother, he accepts that the wheel is come full circle (Lear V, iii, 203).

Fortune, the stars and the gods are all at one time or another blamed for the ups and downs of the characters: Gloucester complains that as flies to wanton boys are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport (IV, I, 36f); Kent that stars above us govern our conditions (IV, iii,33). But the villainous Edmund can see that this is so much nonsense. In a soliloquy, he mocks his father’s astrological explanation of Lear’s foolish behaviour towards Cordelia and Kent (I, ii, 118-135), clinching the argument with reference to his own nature: I should have been that I am had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing.

There is a tension here, and elsewhere in Shakespeare, between external and internal influence, between the workings of fate and personal responsibility. As Cassius remarks in Julius Caesar, The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars/ but in ourselves… (I,ii,140f). Human agency, rather than Dame Fortune, brings about the downfall of both Gloucester and Lear: a downfall which has its origins in their own flawed characters and actions.

So when in Act IV Lear declares to Cordelia: Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound/ Upon a wheel of fire that mine own tears/ Do scald like molten lead (IV, vii 46-48) the wheel imagery is not so much (or not only) an allusion to the Wheel of Fortune, but to the punishment of Ixion. Lear recognises that the hell in which he finds himself is not a temporary downward turn, but eternal punishment for his own folly: his only consolation is that Cordelia is not in Tartarus with him.

This is not the only allusion to the story of Ixion in King Lear: earlier (IV, vi, 124-125) he describes his other daughters thus: down from the waist they are centaurs/ Though women all above.  

As we have seen, Ixion was the progenitor of the centaurs, who developed a reputation for bad sexual etiquette, such as the attempted rape of the bride at their cousin’s wedding. They symbolise the untamed, incontinent beast literally underlying civilised and domesticated humanity, and in the case of Regan and Goneril, what Shakespeare sees as a most unladylike lust, ruthlessness and ambition. Lear is explicit about the location of good and evil in women:

But to the girdle do the gods inherit,/ Beneath is all the fiends’ (IV,vi, 127-8)

The sexism of these expected gender roles is of its time; the misogyny of the language of King Lear is something else altogether, however.  From the opening scene where Gloucester asks Kent, Do you smell a fault?  in reference to the circumstances of Edmund’s conception, there is a queasy insistence on associating foul odour and burning pain with women, or more precisely, their genitalia, culminating in the extremes of

There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding stench, consumption… (IV, vi, 129f)

Some critics see in this language a description of a sexually transmitted infection: D H Lawrence for one attributed Shakespeare’s misogynistic language in Lear and other works to the “shock of his consciousness of syphilis”; Anthony Burgess in the fictional biography Nothing Like the Sun came to a similar conclusion.  When Edgar tells Edmund: The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices/ make instruments to plague us:/ The dark and vicious place where thee he got/Cost him his eyes (V, iii, 170-3) he is making the point that their father Gloucester’s sexual desires have resulted in his destruction.

Lear too, though his daughters were got ‘tween lawful sheets, is being punished for the sexual activity that created them. In his fevered mind, women are promiscuous temptresses, men are hypocritical slaves of lust, deserving of painful retribution: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back;/ Thou hotly lusts to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp’st her (IV, vi, 161-3). 

We cannot now know whether the misogyny of Lear’s language is rooted in Shakespeare’s self-disgust, or derived from a (highly unlikely) late conversion to Puritanism/Calvinism, or indeed is purely character-driven, without any resonance in his own life; but for whatever reason, the imagery of King Lear points to the female of the species as the sulphurous pit, the dark and vicious place, – Tartarus; and the male protagonist, tortured eternally on the burning wheel of his own lust, another Ixion.

Delaunay, Ixion précipité dans les Enfers