A Prayer for Life: Water, Art and Spirituality in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Mattia Mantellato (Universitá degli Studi di Udine)

Abstract

Questo saggio analizza La terra desolata di T. S. Eliot da una prospettiva “ecocritica” (Glotfelty & Fromm 1996; Garrard 2004) e “blu” (Hau’ofa 2008; Ingersoll 2016; Mathieson 2021) ovvero inerente al significato dell’elemento acqua nel poema. Partendo dalle innovazioni estetiche e dall’elemento magico che Eliot ci presenta accanto alla sterilità e al degrado della vita dopo la Prima guerra mondiale, l’articolo si focalizza su tre episodi chiave del poema. Questi presentano le rivoluzioni artistiche di quel periodo e le forze evocative e spirituali provenienti dall’eredità americana di Eliot, nonché dal suo interesse per le religioni e filosofie d’Oriente. La lettura delle carte di Madame Sosostris diventa così una danza moderna di archetipi ‘liquidi’. Tiresia, il profeta e veggente, evoca una pittura cubista e richiama la necessità di visioni ‘fluide’ e positive nella nostra vita. La ripetizione della preghiera dello Shanti celebra il ritmo delle gocce d’acqua, unico elemento che potrà guarire e riconnettere gli abitanti de La terra desolata con la Vita – ‘the One life’. In questa mia lettura “indisciplinata” (Benozzo 2010) considero il poema una preghiera per l’acqua, una richiesta collettiva di “partnership” (Eisler 1988; Eisler & Fry 2019) per una rigenerazione e trasformazione del reale, nel riconoscimento che gli esseri umani rappresentino solo una parte della melodia cosmica del mondo.

DOI: 10.17456/SIMPLE-198

Parole chiave: Eliot, The Waste Land, bue humanities, spirituality, art and literature.

Bibliografia

Amideo, Emilio. 2021. Queer Tidalectics: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Auger, Emily E. 2004. Tarot and Other Meditation Decks: History, Theory, Aesthetics, Typology. Jefferson-London: McFarland & Company.

Benozzo, Francesco. 2010. Etnofilologia: Un’Introduzione. Napoli: Liguori.

Benozzo, Francesco. 2021. Brevario di Etnofilologia. Lecce: Pensa Multimedia.

Brathwaite, Edward Kamau. 1992. Caliban’s Guarden. Wasafiri: Focus on the Caribbean, Special Issue, 16: 2-6.

Brooks, Cleanth. 1968 [1939]. The Waste Land: Critique on the Myth. Charles Brian Cox & Arnold P. Hinchliffe eds. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land: A Casebook. London: Macmillan Press, 128-161.

Buell, Lawrence. 2005. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Hoboken: Blackwell Publishing.

Campbell, Alexandra & Michael Paye. 2020. Water Enclosure and World-Literature: New Perspectives on Hydro-Power and World-Ecology. Humanities, 9, 3: 1-15.

Crawford, Robert. 1987. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth & Tatiana Flores. 2020. Submerged Bodies: The Tidalectics of Representability and the Sea in Caribbean Art. Environmental Humanities, 12, 1: 132-166.

Eisler, Riane. 1988. The Chalice & The Blade. Our History, Our Future. New York: Harper Collins.

Eisler, Riane. 1995. Sacred Pleasure, Sex, Myth, and the Politics of the Body: New Paths to Power and Love. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Eisler, Riane. 2000. Tomorrow’s Children. Cambridge: Westview Press.

Eisler, Riane. 2002. The Power of Partnership. Novato: New World Library.

Eisler, Riane. 2007. The Real Wealth of Nations: Creating A Caring Economics. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler.

Eisler, Riane & Douglas P. Fry. 2019. Nurturing Our Humanity. How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism: The New Critical Idiom. New York: Routledge.

Glotfelty, Cheryll & Harold Fromm eds. 1996. The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Halberstam, Jack. 2020. Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hau’ofa, Epeli. 2008. We Are the Ocean: Selected Works. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.

Ingersoll, Karin A. 2016. Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology. Durham: Duke University Press.

Jodorowsky, Alejandro & Marianne Costa. 2009 [2004]. The Way of Tarot: The Spiritual Teacher in the Cards [Jon E. Graham trans]. Rochester: Destiny Books.

Kaplan, Stuart R. 2003 [1970]. Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling. Stamford: U. S. Games Systems.

Kearns, Cloeo McNelly. 1987. T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: a Study in Poetry and Belief. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Martin, Manuel. 2021a. L’arte dei Tarocchi, un codice per leggere la Realtà. Volume 1, La Via Maschile. Vignate: Cavinato International.

Martin, Manuel. 2021b. L’arte dei Tarocchi, un codice per leggere la Realtà. Volume 2, La Via Femminile. Vignate: Cavinato International.

Mathieson, Jolene. 2021. The Blue Humanities, Maritime Literature, and Educational Ecology in the Age of Climate Change. Roman Bartosch ed. Cultivating Sustainability in Language and Literature Pedagogy. Steps to an Educational Ecology. London: Routledge, 108-127.

Mentz, Steve. 2009. At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean. New York: Continuum.

Mester, Terry A. 1997. Movement and Modernism: Yeats, Eliot, Lawrence, Williams, and Early Twentieth-Century Dance. Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press.

Moody, David ed. 2005 [1994]. The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pearson, Carol S. 1991. Awakening the Heroes Within. Twelve Archetypes to Help Us Find Ourselves and Transform Our World. San Francisco: Harper & Row.

Pollard, Charles W. 2004. New World Modernisms: T. S. Eliot, Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Virginia: University of Virginia Press.

Rainey, Lawrence ed. 2005. The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose. New Haven-London: Yale University Press.

Riem, Antonella & Tony Hughes-d’Aeth eds. 2022. Ecosustainable Narratives and Partnership Relationships in World Literatures in English. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Serpieri, Alessandro (a cura di) 2014 [1985]. T. S. Eliot: La terra desolata. Milano: BUR Rizzoli.

Steinberg, Philip & Kimberley Peters. 2015. Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 33, 2: 247-264.

Stutley, Margaret. 2003. Shamanism: An Introduction. London-New York: Routledge.

Tomlinson, David. 1980. T. S. Eliot and The Cubists. Twentieth Century Literature, 26, 1: 64-81.

Williamson, George. 1967. A Reader’s Guide to T. S. Eliot: A Poem-By-Poem Analysis. London: Thames & Hudson.

Wirth, Oswald. 2006. Les Tarot: Des Imagiers du Moyen Age. Paris: Tchou.

Webliografia

Alonso-Breto, Isabel. 2022. (forthcoming) Indoceanic Tidalectics: Aquatic Embodiments and Metaphors in Lankan Literature. Paper delivered at the International Conference: Aquatic Cartographies: Oceanic Imaginaries, Histories and Identities, University of Lleida (Spain), 21-22 July 2022, https://ratnakara.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/Programme.pdf (consulted on 18/10/2022).

Eliot,Thomas Stearns. 1921. London Lettershttps://theworld.com/~raparker/exploring/tseliot/ works/london-letters/london-letter-1921-10.html#navigation (consulted on 18/10/2022).

Fabbro, Franco in conversation with Marco Montemagno. Online Interview. Neurosciences, mindfulness and a multitude of other things, Youtube Channel, 16/06/2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TwD_cEAlOE&t=913s (consulted on 18/10/2022).

Views: 663

Download PDF

Downloads: 1139