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.