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.