CHAPTER IV

The Figural Devices and AlamkZra Dhvani

The classical view of figurative language is that it is

a detachable ornament applied on ordinary language. By

being figurative, a poet can transfer the beautifying

aspects of figurality to ordinary language, stylising poetic

expressions. The Greek word "metaphora" denotes the concept ~- . . ~~

of aesthetic transference, by being etymologically derived

from "meta" meaning "over," and "pherein" meaning "to

carry." Based on some very obvious functional differences

in figurality, Aristotle classified language into logic,

rhetoric, and poetic. Fetaphor, according to Aristotle, is

"the application to one thing of a name belonging to another

thing," and he classifies figurality on the basis of the

specific and generic qualities of the analogues.' Chapter

twenty one of Poetics deals with these classifications.

Cicero, Horace, and Longinus also shared similar views

on the operation of figures as being "cosmetic" in their

effects on ordinary expression. Quintilian endorsed the

concept of transference based on a discreet evaluation of

the similarities and dissimilarities of the figure and the

standard form of language. In short, the Western classical

view r>f tiqu+a.l.ity was based on the notion that language in

i t : : sl tc tndard or. ordinary form was a true reflex of reality

I any attempt at embellishing it had only a very

subjective semantic appeal and significance.

The Romantics were preoccupied with the basic

contradiction between fancy or imagination, and reason, and

had to take a deviant view of figurality. They perceived

reality as being understood linguistically through the

faculty of imagination. For them the objective "hurrying of

material" as experienced by man through the sensory

exposures is the result of the "vitally metaphorical

function" of the linguistic medium. As a result; the

romantic subjectivism was a greater reality than material

reality for them. The Romantic view approximates to what

Wallace Stevens said about metaphor: "Reality is a clichh

from which we escape by metaphor. ,, 2

The twentieth century views on figurality owe much to . h . * ' :

I .A. Richard'>'{arguments in The Philosophy of Rhetoric %A. 2 - a . . ''

( 1 9 3 6 ) , which consolidate the Romantic views on metaphor on

1 one side, and open up the possibility of redefining the

i semantic, cultural, and linguistic functions of language on 1 1 the other. He starts from the proposition that meaning is

universally relative, and that every language seeks new

correlations among material objects as a significant level

of reality which is fundamentally linguistic rather than

:3 objective. Words are not "events" in themselves, but are

the totality of the conventions which derive from our

employment of them. Words do not mean, but we mean by words

according to Richards. Figurality is a significant

linguistic function, and it is a linguistic recreation of a

new semantic awareness. Far from being an embellishment of

a standard variety of experience and reality in language, a

metaphor achieves a diversion and escape, creating a new

integrity, a role, and an order.

The stretching of linguistic devices to new frontiers

of experience and reality as a metaphor does, inevitably

results in ambiguity in poetry according to Empson:

An ambiguity in ordinary speech; means something

very pronounced, and as a rule witty or deceitful.

I propose to use the word in an extended sense,

and shall think relevant to my subject any verbal

nuance, however slight, which gives room for

alternative reactions to the same piece of

language. 4

The anthropologists and linguists of the twentieth

century, in their attempts to properly correlate the

affinities between "ways of life" and "ways of thinking" in

the case of man as a species, made great advances in the

understanding of the figural devices of language. The

mythical and metaphorical apprehension of reality within the

operational limits of the linguistic medium began to be

approved of as an inevitable aspect of language function.

H . L . Whorf and Edward Sapir argued that a man's experience

of life and apprehension of the world depended on the

linguistic conditioning effected by the language he spoke.

An individual's mental activity, impressions, and the

synthesis of his ideas depended on the linguistic medium.

Thus the speaker of Hopi (an American Indian

language) 'sees the world' through the lens of his

own language, and that world differs significantly

from the one seen by the native speaker of

English. 5

The mythical and metaphorical devices appear as the

methods of improving the awareness of reality through the

/ medium of language. Claude L6vi-Strauss has made extensive

studies on the working of the mythical imagination of the

primitive mind as an attempt at exploring the linguistic

possibilities of the contrasting and correlating aspects of

natural 'and social conditions. It is this sociological

interaction that results in the metaphorical transformation

of the language medium, evoking complex word-pictures out of

a bewildering range of images, which may appear as

ambiguous, complex, or strange for sometime. The

sociological and linguistic context slowly wanes into the

ordinary awareness of the society, and the metaphorical or

figural aspect of language becomes naturalised as ordinary

expression. As a result, any language becomes inundated

with a lot of dead metaphors.

The concept of style as deviation and chbice owes much

to Jan Mukarovsky's concept of "foregrounding" and

Jacobson's views on "metonymy" and "metaphor. " Mukarovsky

anticipates a background for the foregrounded metaphor,

which is none other than the standard structures of ordinary

language. In due course the metaphor becomes automatised. I

Roman Jacobson, on the otherhand, conceives of a horizontal

axis of syntagmatic and metonymous structures, and a

vertical axis of paradigmatic metaphorical structures. All

linguistic structures according to him show either

metonymous or metaphorical characteristics according to the

choice of the writer, which again depend on his

psychological affinity towards contiguity or similarity as

the case may be. /'

J

The question of figurality in language is not a '

sociological phenomenon in Indian Aesthetics, nor is it 1

purely cosmetic as the-classical rhetors of the West viewed

it. Figurality is a part of poeticity which forms the

undifferentiated totality of the constituent elements of a

composition. The pre-dhvani critics--Bhamaha, Udbhata,

Dandin, and Rudrata--were the rhetoricians interested in the

analysi-s, definition, and classification of the figurative

types. Exaggeration or atigayokti and a crooked or oblique

manner of speech called vakrokti are two significant

characteristics of poetic expression, and all figurality of

expression should contain an affinity to either of these / Lk '6 * common characteristics. BhZmaha denied the very idea of -1

' , +Ira '4

realistic or natural presentation called svabhavokti on the * -

2 ground that a totally unexaggerated expression cannot but be r

> c 4c mere information such as "the sun has set, the moon shines, '*

P P the birds are returning to their nests. "' Udbhata, Dandin, < ! . -

. . I

and Rudrata followed the argument of Bhamaha and denounced 2% I t - 1 '

svabhavokti. But Kuntaka took a different view altogether, ? " 6 h(L

arguing that even unexaggerated expressions can achieve

poetic heights, without any pretensions of figurality, and

the swing of figural language is from svabhzvokti to

J vakrokti. The grading of figurality on the basis of

phonemic or semantic differences is the fundamental working

principle of alamkaras, and the principle works on the

presumption that every alamkzra is a deviation from

svabhavokti and is functionally an embellishment. 10

Bhamaha recognises about three dozen alamkaras as

subdivisions or derivatives of the four major figures

mentioned in the NdtyaiZstra. These four major figures are:

alliteration or anuprzsa, rhyme or yamaka, metaphor or

riipaka (dipaka), and simile or upama. Though BhZmaha gave

the subdivisions in a discursive manner, he took the view

that overtechnicality in the construction of figures would

mar poetic beauty and affect the proper appreciation of

poetry. Spurning or aksepa, corroboration or

arthantaranyzsa, contrast or vyatireka, miracle or

vibhavana, condensed expression or samHsokti, enumeration or

yathzsankhya, fancy or utpreksa, and affectionate speech or

preyas are some of the major sub-categories identified and

explained by Bhzmaha. Later additions to alamkzra szstra

include figures like praise of what is not the subject or

aprastutapra6amsa, sham praise or vyzjastuti,

simile-metaphor or upam2riipaka, contradiction or virodha,

and illustration or nidarkana. 11

Before any attempt at explicating the figural aspects

of The Waste Land is made, it is imperative that two

significant Western aesthetic concepts--image and

symbol--are to be explained in the light of alamkarzs. In

the case of lexical figurativeness, which is called

arthzlamkara, Indian rhetors have identified uparnzna and

upameya, which appxoximate to vehicle and tenor, and the

semantic relationship between upamzna and upameya becomes

the criterion for the grading and classification of

alamkbras. The mutual transfer of qualities called upakara

is fundamental to the process of lexical figuration.

According to Vamana, the relationship between upamzna and

upameya in upama or simile is the most fundamental figural

type, which could be used as a yardstick for the evaluation

of other types of figures. I L When upama takes up the

possibility of comparison between upamana and upameya on the

basis of apparent and obviously similar qualities, utpreksa

takes "fancy" in the possibility of identifying the upameya

or tenor in the upamana or vehicle. In riipaka or metaphor,

there is a total identification between upameya and

upamana . l3 The concepts of image and symbol have to be

explicated through the analytical evaluation of the lexical

figures in alamksras namely, upama, utpreksa and riipaka,

aprastutapra6amsa, and samzsokti.

The contentions of Cecil Day Lewis that an image is "a

picture made out of words" and also that "a poem may itself

be an image composed from a multiplicity of images" enable

us to see image as an aesthetic concept condensed in

expression, plurivocal in suggestive potentiality, and

deviant in stylistic characteristics. l4 But for Imagists

like T.E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, Hilda Doolittle, Amy Lowell,

Lawrence, and Carlos Williams, whose influence could be

traced in Eliot's poetry, the imagkmeans a definde genre /+5?j; I. T:'

with identifiable characteristics. l 7

A typical imagist poem is written in free verse,

and undertakes to render as exactly and tersely as

possible, without comment or generalisation, the

writer's response to a visual object or scene,

often the impression is rendered by means of a

metaphor, or by juxtaposing a description of one

object with that of a second and diverse object. 15

The Imagist te(chnique being a metaphor or two

purposefully juxtaposed in terselq/expressed wordpictures,

the concept of the image could be functionally brought under

the operational limits of the four major alamkaras in the

samasokti group namely, upama, utpreksa, rilpaka, and

aprastutapra6amsa. If likeness and fancy predominate in the

transference of qualities between upamana and upameya, the

alamkaras upama and utpreksa l6 are identified in the

figurative expression. If upakara or transference of

qualities between upamana and upameya is total so that there

is a complete identification between the two, the alamkzra

is riipaka. l7 In aprastutapra6amsa, there are two figural / /'

components namely, pfastuta or the described, and aprastuta

or the &described. Here the relationship between the

described and the undescribed, need not be correlating or

complementary as in upama, utpreksa, or riipaka, but it can

be contrastive also. l8 In all these alamkaras, the

correlating, complementary, and contrastive aspects of

upakara become a part of the reader's aesthetic response and

sensibility. A true sahrdaya can explore the possibilities

of the figural expression to his full satisfaction and

aesthetic contentment.

' 1 ' -~uxtaposition of diverse objects and events as

different ilnaye clusters is a favourite technique used by

Eliot in The Waste Land. This aspect of the poem makes it

Imagistic. Applying the figurative model of alamkaras on

the Imagistic aspects of The Waste Land, we can identify two /

major groupings of image clusters namely, correlating or

complementar5 and contrastive. The correlating and

complementary image clusters come within the upamana-upameya

models of upama, utpreksa or riipaka, and have very irregular 1 I I 9 1 , 3

occurrence. The contrastive images coming under t1 1 4,V. 2 $prastutaprasamsa are more regular and frequent in the poem,

l and this is used as a fundamental technique. The immense

/ suggestiveness that is attributed to The Waste Land is the

outcome of the correlating and contrastive image clusters, )a# which demand a lot of creative responsiveness on the part of

, the reader in exploring the suggestivd possibilities of the

figures subtly incorporated into the text.

In "The Burial of the Dead" there are contrasting and

complementary or correlated image clusters. The images of

regeneration and fruition in Chaucer's April is

contrastively juxtaposed with the images of drought and

infertility in Weston's waste land. Similarly the

juxtaposing of Marie Larisch's holiday memories with the

bored and superficial chatter of rootless cosmopolitan

travellers makes another instance of contrast coming within

the scope of aprastutapra6amsa. Ezekiel's nightmarish

vision juxtaposed with the Hyacinth girl's fertility image

and the quotations from Tristan and ~solde serve such a

contrastive purpose in which the shift of emphasis is more

on the undescribed degradation than on the described or

suggested contexts of fulfilment and rapture. The terse,

clear, and concentrated image of Chaucer's April becomes the

figure of aprastutaprasamsa by the qualifying adjective

"cruellest" in the first line itself. Similar is the

figural effect on Madame Sosostris' "bad cold." The

contrast here is between her undescribed past repute and the

present day degradation as a mere fortune teller. The

faceless crowd on the London Bridge, the fog in the city,

Mrs Equitone and Belladonna are similar contrastive images

coming within the scope of aprastutapragamsa.

Weston's waste land, Ezekiel's nightmarish vision, and

the degradation of Madame Sosostris manifest correlative or

complementing affinities as suggestive of infertility,

meaninglessness, and death-in-life. Tristan and Isolde, the

Hyacinth girl, and Rudolph and Marie, on the other hand,

show naive love and fruition, and are complementary in their , suggestive relevance. But both these groupings of images

reveal the contrastive figurality of aprastutapras'amsa, when

placed in the poetic context of "The Burial of the Dead."

The second section " A Game of Chess" begins with an

upama in which the urban lady's chair is compared to a

burnished throne glowing on the marble. The ornate

description of the lady's boudoir that follows becomes the

images of the prastuta component of the figure

aprastutapra6amsa suggesting a host of similar descriptions

in Keats's "The Eve of St. Agnes," Marie Larisch's account , of Queen Elizabeth's boudoir, and Shakespeare's description

of the Egyptian queen in Antony and Cleopatra. The myth of

Philomel and the passive frustration of the sophisticated

lady suggested through images like "Shakespeherian Rag,"

"hot water at ten," "a closed car at four," and "walk the

street with my hair down" operate as the described or

prastuta element of aprastutapradamsa suggesting the

aprastuta of the cultural and'moral degradation of modern

man.

Viewed in a different perspective, there is a

deliberate plurality of figural suggestion built into the

images of this section by incorporating deliberately chosen u s ~ L

F. /' odifiers and headk in expressions like "burnished throne,"

"golden cupidon," "doubled the flames of sevenbranched

candelabra," and "a window gave upon the sylvan scene."

Here the description, just because of the lexical affinities

immediately suggests similar description in Shakespeare and

Keats, and this kind of lexical device in which the words

themselves pave the way for suggesting an avarnya element is - - -.

an archetypal lexical figure named samasokti. l9 similarly

the images related to the seduction of Philomel refer to the /

purzvrtta of the myth in Metamorphosis, and can be brought

under the figure named udatta. 2 0

/'

The concluding lines of "A Game of Chess" dealing with

the cockney chatter of working class women punctuated by the

refrain of the barman present realistic images of

contemporary city life. The unexaggerated presentation of

unfaithfulness in married life, abortion, pills, and false

teeth in the cockney chatter, operates on the level of

photographic realism in vividness and credibility and can be /

/' included within the figure of svabhzvokti. 2 1 !

"The Fire Sermon" begins with a riipakam or metaphor in

the expression "the fingers of leaf ," and proceeds to give

an image cluster presenting a vision of the Thames in

Spenser's "Prothalamion." The nymphs and lovers are

preparing for a wedding on the banks of the river in

J Spenser's poem. From this varnya level, the poet suggests

f L L the avarnya level of autmn desolation, and the pollution of

A the river banks made by the promiscuous lovers of the

metropolis in the course of their nocturnal revelry, as

another instance of the figural effect of aprastutapra&amsa.

These images are followed by references to the Old

Testament, The Tempest, and to the story of Actaeon and

Diana in images like "Leman," "my brother's wreck," and

"sound of horns." All these could be brought under udatta,

being pointedly referring to some CirZvrtta, an already

r' ,' existing celebrated event, instance, or similar context.

The image of "sound of horns" assumes figural effect as the

same sound of horns heralds the arrival of Actaeon to Diana

in the myth, though in the context of the poem it is just

the sound of motor horns suggesting the arrival of a

potential customer to Mrs Porter's brothel in the

metropolis. Here the figural effect is that of samiisokti as

the "sound of horns'' suggests two contexts and two levels of

meaning by the same expression itself.

The seduction of the typist by the carbuncular young

man and the song of the Thames daughters are perhaps

credible and convincing narrative instances showing a close

affinity to a realistic cinematic sequence, and coming

within the scope of svabhavokti with all the details of

character, conduct, and behaviour. It may be noted that the

description of the seduction scene contains two beautiful

similes or upama with very effective upameya and upamzna

correlations. The first instance of upama begins with the

image of "human engine," which is a riipaka or metaphor. / Thls rupaka becomes the upameya of the upamiina "throbbing

C__ - . - - - -

taxi," the upama vscaka being "like," and the transferred

/ qualities of figurality being the "mechanical alertness" of

the engine and the throbbing taxi to escape from the dull

state of "stasis" in the office or on the road. The second

image that assumes the figural effect of upama is in the

description of the carbuncular agent's clerk "on whom

assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire." i

f . / Here the upameya is an abstract noun "assurance" personified & A S

to match the "silken hat" which is the upamzna. The -~ --.

effectiveness of the figure lies in the softness and glitter

of the silken hat's assured grip on the scheming head of the

millionaire, as compared with the pleasant and pleasing

certainties of his business transactions which seldom slip

off the targets of profit.

The section "Death by Water" contains images of death

and transformation into a regenerated state of existence

which undoubtedly connote the message of/abstinence and

asceticiBm in the Buddha and St Augustine, and the

exhortation of St Paul in the Epistle to the Romans to seek

rebirth by baptism into death. The reference to the

practice of throwing the effigy of the fertility god into

the sea in the mystery religions in anticipation of his

rebirth, and the suggestive tones of the lines from The - Tempest make these images come within the operational scope

of udstta, referring to a host of pur~vrtta or mythical or

classical. allusions, and aprastutapragamsa, where the

undescribed is suggested through the described elements of

the figure.

In the figure called bhzvikam, the past and the future

mix inorder to create a unique present experiencez2 which is

exactly what is happening in the figural effect of the last

section of the poem "What the Thunder Said." The section is

replete with innumerable religious images and symbols which

point to a spiritual /landscape where past, present, and

future coalesce in the unique personal consciousness of the

quester, the narrator, the poet, and the reader as a single

poetic persona. The suggestion of the journey to Emmaus and

the nightmarish vision of the journey to the Chapel Perilous

are instances of udatta, and the spiritual implication of

the tortuous experience as the one and only means of 1 4' redemption for mankind is an instance of aprastutapra6amsa.

The image clusters that constitute the intense passage

beginning with "What is that sound high in the air," and

ending in "Shantih shantih shantih" become figurally

suggestive by assuming the qualities of udztta,

aprastutapra6amsa, bhzvikam, and svabhsvokti. The ,-

nightmarish'vision of the decay of Eastern'Europe expressed

through drought-stricken and cracked landscape, hooded

hordes of swarming crowds, women fiddling on tight-drawn

strings of black hair, and the falling towers of the city is

a prophecy that will come true if the spiritual message goes

unheeded. This shift from the past to the future brings

r into operation. the figural effect of bhzvikam.

-. The

description of the nightmare and the Chapel Perilous is so

vivid and credible due to the stringing of choice

sense-images that the figural effect is that of svabhBvokti. @-k - u The references to the Bible, the Grail legend, the ~ u 7 c i

Upanishad, Dante, and the Spanish Traqedy crowding into the

compact lines and image clusters enhance the range of the

figure udztta. The ultimate spiritual message that remains Y~

as an avarnya, in the messy packing up of heterogeneous but - - - highly evocative images, makes the figure of - aprastutapras'amsa in the concluding section of the poem. It

can be seen that the last section of The Waste Land is rich

in figurativeness because of the abundance of images endowed

with a lot of suggestive possibilities primarily due to the

these figures.

The symbol - also is another significant suggestive

device used by Eliot in The Waste Land. Though many

continental poets had made effective use of personal and

public symbols in their poetry, the use of symbol as a

distinct poetic device in the genre called Symbolist poetry

was inaugurated in Baudelaire's Fleurs du Ma1 (1857). 23 It

was continued by Rimbaud, Verlaine, Mallarme, and Valerie

and was taken up in England in the early decades of the

century by Arthur Symons, Y.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Ezra

Pound, and Dylan Thomas. A symbol is expected to suggest a

number of references beyonde itself and by exploiting

pre-existing and widely shared'associations and parallelisms

can bring in figural effects ranging from simile, metaphor,

and a1 Legory. 2 4 As the symbol manifests heterogeneity in

its flgural effect as a suggestive poetic device, any

attempt at equating it with an alamkara will be an

unjustifiable exercise. A more reasonable thing will be an ,

effort to find out the operational limits and possibilities >. I

of the symbols of The Waste Land within the figural scope of !$, ,-

the identifiable alamkzras in Indian aesthetic theory.

The symbols of The Waste Land could be broadly

categorised as symbols of time, place, elements like water,

earth and fire, love, lust, and the symbolic personae of the

questers, victims and sinners. As for the symbols of time,

place, water, earth, fire and love, there are two

contrastive aspects of meaning. Most of these symbols stand

for two contextually different aprastutas as a part of the

contrastive operation of prastutas and- aprastutzs in the

figure of aprastutapragamsa. The symbols f time swing

between the contrastive levels of sacrednesdand pr'bfanity.

The regenerating and fructifying spring of Chaucer's April,

and the glorious times of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante and

Spenser contrast with the cruellest April, the brown dawn of

the unreal city, and the uncertain and deadly predictions of

Madame Sosotris' horoscopes and fortune-telling. Dante's

violet time of visions and dreams in Purgatorio contrasts

with the apocalyptic and ominous violet light in which bats

with hahy faces whistle and beat their wings. The time of 1

Christ's appearance in the journey to Emmaus, and the time

of cock crowing and the message of the thunder have

corroborative figural effect as related to the prophetic and

moralistic messages of the poem. Whether contrastive or

corroborative, these symbols move from the described level

of meaning to the undescribed, or from the prastuta to the /

aprastuta within the figural possibilities o f

aprastutapras'amsa.

Another group of contrastive symbols which move from

prastuta to aprastuta in the figural effect are those

related to place and include the Hyacinth garden, the garden -.

p- of ~athsernane, the mountains where Marie Larisch and her * cousin ~udolf felt free, and the Himavant. The shadow of

the red rock, the Perilous chapel of the Grail legend, the

churches of Saint Mary Woolnoth and Magnus Martyr, and the

cupola where the children are singing are the other sacred

symbols of place which stand for the spiritual regeneration /

and fertility of mankind. The contrastive symbols of place,

which are profane and unredemptive are the garden that fails

the Hyacinth girl, the betrayal in Gathsemane, Mrs Porter's

brothel, the urban lady's boudoir, the typist's garret and

the rat's alley. In their semantic effect these symbols

move from the described to the undescribed in contrastive or

corroborative figurality and so come within the operational

scope of aprastutaprasfamsa as alamkara.

Elemental symbols such as water, fire, and air signally

contribute to the symbolic framework of The Waste Land.

Water for example is a powerful symbol of rebirth,

fertility, and regeneration. The shower that heralds

summer, the Thames daughters and Rhine sisters, the Ganga,

the ritual washing of Christ's feet, the transformation of

the king through the sea water in The Tempest, and the

thunder and the rain conveying the spiritual message are

prastutSs leading to the redemptive mission that the poem is

expected to communicate as the aprastuta. Another set of

water symbols such as drought, empty cisterns, desiccated

land, mudcracked houses, empty social rituals like "the hot

water at ten," Phlebas, death by water, Mrs Porter's

perverted washing of feet with soda water as a profaned

ritual, and the polluted Thames present the prastuta level

of meaning, highlighting the aprastuta of decadent culture,

religion, and the spiritual values of life.

The cleansing fire symbol related to the Buddha, St

Augustine and ante's Divine Comedy contrasts with the fires

of madness, destruction of cities, and the fire of lust, in

the prastuta and aprastuta correlations within the figural

operation of aprast~ta~ragamsa. Similarly air in its

reverberat~ng and thunderous tones communicates the message

of "Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata" in a foreign tongue. The

same air blows as the dry wind through the parched land and

carries the murmur of maternal lamentations. These can also

t l r !-*ken as the contrastive aspects of prastuta and

aprastuta in the figure of aprastutapragamsa effectively

communicating the grim awareness of contemporary reality

with the help of the elemental symbols in the poem.

The symbols of naive love between the sexes abound in

the poem as exemplified in Rudolf and Marie, Tristan and

~solde, Hyacinth girl and the speaker, Antony and Cleopatra,

Elizabeth and Leicester, and Marvell's lovers in the poem

"To His Coy Mistress." As the prastuta, these symbols

immediately suggest love as the highest spiritual and human

value. In another set of contrasting symbols, we come

across the prastuta of passionless and mechanical

expressions of lust, as in the seduction of the typist by

the carbuncular young man, and in the violation of the

Thames daughters. At the aprastuta level, both these

symbols of love and lust point to the lamentable moral and

cultural decadence of the contemporary society. Lil's

abortions, Eugenide's perversions, violation of La Pia and

Philomel, and the prostitution of Mrs Porter, her daughter

and Sweeny, are other examples of the subtly incorporated

symbols of profaned sexuality and vulgar sex.

Some of the symbols in The Waste Land become highly

evocative conforming to the identifying qualities and

standards set by Indian rhetors in their study of alamkzras. i Many of such symbols occur at random, but contribute in a 1

I

unique manner to the suggestiveness of the poem. In the

figure called samasokti, for example, the avarnya is

suggested through visesana sFimya or mutual applicability of

the qualifiers or modifiers. If the use of a qualifier or

modifier in a particular varnya applies evocatively to an

avarnya which is mythical, grammatical, divine, or profane,

there is the presence of the alamkzra called samasokti. In

symbols like "red rock," "unreal city," "burnished throne,"

"the one walking beside you in a brown mantle, hooded" etc

the evocation of the suggested sense is achieved with the

help of modifiers like red, unreal, burnished, brown, and

/ A : , qualifiers like hooded. The reference to Dante, Baudelaire, G-.- , ..-

Shakespeare, and the Bible comes to the reader's mind as an ..Jt-"-.9 'i : ~ . .. i i .

avarnya through the semantic figuration of samasokti in r

these examples. I

The poetic personae who appear in The Waste Land merge fk- into one another sharing some common qualities as questers, /&6~6(/

victims, or as sinners. Most of the characters including ,: fl

the narrative persona Tiresias undergo this poetic

metamorphosis at various junctures in the progression of the

poem. As questers, victims, or as sinners they become part

of an inclusive consciousness sharing a predominant emotion,

compulsion or motive and the conscientious reader or

sahgdaya can perceive and identify their transformations.

I f we take the characters as symbolic abstractions in

the background of myths--literary, cultural, and

anthropological--we find some kind of a figural

/

transformation taking place in them when they line up as

questers, victims, and sinners. For example, in the

category of/cquesters, we come across TireSias, Ferdinand,

Phlebas, Adonis, the Fisher King, Arnaut Daniel, the Buddha,

and St Augustine. The search for eternal values in life,

and an implicit faith in the uniqueness of human existence

as renewable and redemptive through sacrifice, characterise

these questers in the poem. Similarly, the Hyacinth girl,

Thames daughters, Philomel, the hanged god of Frazer,

Christ, Dido, and the Rhine maidens share the halo of some

kind of rna(tyrdom, of course at different levels of trespass

and victimisation. The sinners are many sharing the evil

motifpf motivelesg malignity in an essentially egotistical I -

world full of mechanical concerns, values, and conditions of

life. The typist, Sweeny, Mrs Porter, the one-eyed

merchant, Lil, and all the other inhabitants of the waste

land belong to this category of poetic personae, and they

I/ are characterised by their total indifference to the idea of

sins or the scriptural trespasses, which perhaps was the

/' biggest controfiing and corrective ethical obsession in the

world of Dante, Christ, the Buddha, and St Augustine. 1

This categorisation is made possible among the poetic

personae just because they possess generic characteristics

and commonly shared motifs, in spite of their heterogeneous

mythical backgrounds. If the quester motif, the motif of -.

victimisation, and the motif of sinning are taken as the ... -. .

I

aprastutas, the three categories of poetic personae will

configurate around these motifs as highly evocative

prastutas, at the same time establishing commonly shared

characteristics as mythical personalities or as character

types within the framework of the poem. This configuration J /

of symbolic abstractions as poetic personae around - - established motifs of sex, religion, and culture as the - - focal points, in a highly evocative and suggestive figural

system of interrelations of transferred qualities

upaczra, is a great poetic achievemen4 pointing to the

unique structural cohesion of The Waste Land.

Or\ /

The Waste Land is a poem filled with innumerable

quotations beginning from Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter and

ending in the Upanishad and the Spanish Traqedy. Every

quotation fishes out suggestion either as a context or as an

experience in the mind of the sahrdaya, and will come within

the figural confines of udztta, as all these point to the

glorious dyths of literdture, cult/ure, or ant&opology. The

effort made by Eliot to create the figural effect of udztta

is deliberate as the mythical background of the poem is >

intended to be the suggestive sug-text of the poem. -->

'rhe Indian aesthetic concepts of alamkEras operate on

the principle that figurality embellishes the connoted

meaning within the rigid and identifiable framework of

upamzna and upameya, prastuta and aprastuta, or visaya and

visayi. These can be applied to a poem like The Waste Land

also, obviously for evolving some useful insights and

perspectives unique in nature. Eliot was aware of the

suggestive possibilities of the image and the symbol

primarily because Imagism and Symbolism were highly

influential poetic movements in England during the time of

his writing The Waste Land. His use of the image and the

symbol in the poem appears to be very effective as it helps

to evoke an intensely emotional poetic atmosphere exploiting

fully the figural possibilities of the image and the symbol

as poetic devices. The suggestive use of images and symbols

broadly approximate to the figural operations of alamkaras

like aprastutapra6amsa, samasokti, udztta, dristznta, upama,

and riipaka. Though a strict conformity to all the semantic

criteria laid down by alamkzrikas is a virtual'

impossibility, the very fact that Eliot opts for the most

suggestive figural devices identified and explained by

Indian rhetors centuries ago is sufficient justification for , I 1-

any attempt at analysing the poem in the perspectives of the

Indian aesthetic theory of alamkzras as coming under the

scope of figural suggestion in poetry. It can be

confidently said that The Waste Land is a poem abudantly

suggestive at the figural level, the figural suggestion

being a unique contributory factor to the evocation of rasa

in The Waste Land.

Notes

Terence Hawkes, Metaphor: The Critical Idiom (London:

Methuen, 1972) 7.

Hawkes 57.

I.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (London:

Oxford, 1936) 10.

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930;

London: Chatto and Windus, 1953) 1.

Hawkes 81

Hawkes 86.

Ramnn Selden deals with Jan Mukarovsky's formalist

concepts like defamiliarisation, foregrounding, and

automatisation in his study of the different aspects of the

Aesthetic Function as theorised by The Prague Linguistic

Circle founded in 1926. These concepts have gone into the

making of the theoretical basis of Structuralism.

Raman Selden, A Reader's Guide to Contemporary Literary i

Theory (1985; London: Harvester, 1989) 20.

Selden also analyses Roman Jacobson's concepts of the

metonymous and metaphorical functions of the syntagmatic and

paradigmat-ic structures in a discourse. i

Selden 62.

V.K. Chari, Sanskrit Criticism (Delhi: Motilal, 1993)

35.

In the AlamkZrasarvasvam, Ruyyaka (AD 1125 - 7 5 )

sums up the traditional notions of alamkara as the

embellishment of primary meaning. The first line after the

mangalasloka can be translated as follows:

Here ancient rhetors, BhFimaha and Udbhata and the

like are of the opinion that any kind of connoted

meaning only embellishes the primary meaning, and

hence the connoted meaning falls under the

category of alamkzras.

Ruyyaka, AlamkSrasarvasvam, ed. Ramachandra Diwedi

(1959; Lucknow: Viswavidyalayam, 1976) 2.

l1 A.K. Warder, Indian Kdvya Literature (Delhi:

Motilal, 1989) 86-91.

l2 Sushi1 Kumar De, History of Sanskrit Poetics

(Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1976) 101.

l3 The eleventh sntra of the AlamkZrasarvasvam deals

with upama as a fundamental figure. Ruyyaka defines upama

in the following lines:

upamSnopameyayoh sadharmye

bhedzbhedatulyatve upama

According to these lines upama is a figure in which two

objects which could be presented as upam2ina and upameya are

compared on the basis of parity between similarity and

dissimilarity.

Within the concept of bhedzbhedatulyatvs, upama exists

as a key figure. When abhed~mha or total similarity

predominates, riipakam is the resultant figure. If the

object is poetically fancied as a different thing due to the

presence of some common traits, it is the figure called

utpreksa.

Ruyyaka 30.

l4 M.H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms (1978;

Madras: Elacmillan, 1981) 76.

l5 Abrams 78.

l6 Ruyyaka defines utprekaa in the twenty first sutra

of the Alamkarasarvasvam.

adhyavaszye vyapZraprZdhanye utpreksa

A conscious assertion of vi~ayi or upamana as

predominant to vi~aya or upameya is called adhyavaszye in

the siitra. When this assertion is central to the figure,

the result is utpreksa.

Ruyyaka 63.

l7 The fifteenth siitra of the AlamkZrasarvasvam defines

riipakam as foilows:

abhedapradhanye arope aropavisayanapanhave

rGpakam.

When abhedamsa predominates in the figural

relationship between visaya (upameya) and visayi (upamxna)

as a superimposition of figurality without concealing

visaya, the alamkara is riipakam.

Ruyyaka 15.

l8 The thirty fourth sutra of the AlamkZrasarvasvam

defines aprastutaprasamsa in the following lines:

/ aprastutat samanyavisesabhHve

karyakzranabhsve sarupyeca

prastutapratitau aprastutapragamsa

When from the aprastuta by means of a

sSmanyavis'esabhava, kzryaksranabhava or szriipya, there is

the evocation of prastuta, it becomes the figure called

aprastutaprasamsa. The linking factor between prastuta and

aprastuta is called sambandha, and it can appear as sarrianya,

vi6eesa, karyakarana or szriipya.

SZrKpya is based on szdharmyz (likeness) or vaidharmya

(contrast).

Ruyyaka 144.

l9 The thirty first sutra of the AlamkZrasarvasvam

defines samasokti in the following lines:

visesapa samyat aprastutasya gamyatve

samasokti.

In samasokti, the aprastuta is suggested by virtue of

mutually applicable qualifiers.

Ruyyaka 108.

20 In the eighty first sutra, Ruyyaka defines udzttam

as follows:

samrddhimat vastuvarnanam udzttam.

In this figure the incidental descriptive reference

gives an exalted effect to the described object.

A contextual reference to the laudable traits or deeds of a

great person (mahZpurusacaritam) can also come under the

figure called udattam.

Ruyyaka 262-63.

21 Svabhzvokti is the figure dealing with totally

realistic descriptions.

Warder 84.

22 Bhamaha refers to the figure called bhsvikam.

De 46.

23 Abrams 170.

2 4 Abrams 168-69.