A Passage to the Waste Land: An analysis of modernism and intertextuality represented in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

A Passage to the Waste Land An analysis of modernism and intertextuality represented in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”

and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

BA-project, Summer 2012 Casper Christoffersen

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Table of Contents

A Passage to the Waste Land 1

Introduction and thesis 3 Thesis statement 3

The Revolutionary and the Classic 4 “The Waste Land” as a breakthrough for high modernism 4 A Passage to India as a modernist classic 5

Similarities between the two works 6 Self-awareness 7 Structure versus non-structure 8 Religion and Spirituality 11

Discussion and Conclusion 13

Danish Abstract / Dansk Resumé 15

Sources 16


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Introduction and thesis Modern literature has seen many great writers, many of whom have become part of the

literary canon of the English-speaking world. One of the great movements of modern

literature occurred in the post-World War I years, when the writers of the High Modernism

era rose from the rubble of the war and started an entirely new trend in literature. Two

acknowledged writers who took part in this movement were the poet T.S. Eliot and the

novelist E.M. Forster. “The Waste Land” (1922) by Eliot is recognized by critics as “perhaps the

most important poem of the 20th century” (Koster, 277). Published in 1922, during the peak of

the literary revolution, it serves as an almost perfect archetype of the era and the genre. Two

years later, E.M. Forster publishes A Passage to India (1924), and it became an instant classic.

A Passage to India is now recognized as one of the great works of the 20th century. The novel

is seen as part of the modernist movement – but is this entirely true? Why is “The Waste Land”

so important – can it be recognized in other high modernist works of the same era? How is

the influence of “The Waste Land” visible in contemporary art? How does the Waste Land

echo into the Marabar Caves?

Thesis statement

T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster are prime examples of writers who took the lead in the explosive

expansion of the high modernist era of the early 20th century. Although the writers come from

vastly different backgrounds, their works are part of the literary canon and have been

recognized as highly influential. “The Waste Land”, published in 1922, has been recognized as

one of the most important works of the time and the tendencies present in the poem have

been celebrated as trend setting for the entire modernist era. The influence of the poem is

apparent in works of contemporary writers, notably in E.M. Forsters A Passage To India which

has been called a modernist classic. “The Waste Land” is called a defining piece for

modernism. If this is true, we can define modernism by it, and we can thus define A Passage

to India as a modernist text through the recognition of shared theme and symbol between it

and “The Waste Land”.

Method

This paper does not seek to make a thorough analysis of the main texts at hand, as it rather

seeks a comparison between the two. Many great essayists and critics have worked thoroughly

with the individual texts throughout their careers, and while an individual analysis of the two

texts would certainly be interesting, it would prove to be too comprehensive in our search for

the influence of “The Waste Land” in A Passage To India. Both the poem and the novel are

very dense and ambitious, and if a complete analysis of the two works were to be made, this

thesis would have to take the form of a book rather than just a paper. Obviously, as we seek

shared meaning, form, allusions, content, themes or context in the two texts, analysis of


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selected parts of both the novel and poem will be made; with the purpose of understanding

the texts and their intertextual relationship and to be able to recognize patterns present in

both texts.

This paper does seek to compare “The Waste Land” with the novel A Passage to India with

regards to their intertextual relationship. This will be done using both the hermeneutic and

comparative analysis methods. Furthermore, a discussion of modernism represented in the

texts and the ideas behind the works will be made. Essential to analyzing works from the high

modernism era is also the understanding of that era, which will result in including some

biographical content in the paper as well. Sources apart from the two main sources by Forster

and Eliot have as such been chosen on their level of either biographical content of the subject

writers, historical content or critical content of the literary texts.

The Revolutionary and the Classic

“The Waste Land” as a breakthrough for high modernism

Born in 1888 and raised in St. Louis, Missouri, Thomas Stearns Eliot was the last of seven

children. Due to suffering from congenital double hernia, he was unable to partake in much

physical activity as a child. He sought to books for entertainment, and was quickly infatuated

with the world of literature. Eliot started writing poetry by the age of fourteen. His first

published poem was published in 1905, when Eliot was just 17 years old. In 1914 he was awarded

a scholarship to Merton College in Oxford, England, and Eliot thus moved to England to

study. He disliked college life and left in 1915, moving to London to teach English at Birkbeck

University. In London he met Ezra Pound, an American expatriate who, at the time, already

was an established writer and who was working and writing with modernist contemporaries.

Literary critic John Worthen explains how it was “Pound who helped most, introducing him

[Eliot] everywhere” (Worthen 34). Pound aided in the publication of Eliot’s “The Love Song of

J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915), which became Eliot’s first widely recognized poem. In 1922 Eliot

publishes “The Waste Land” – the same year as Virgina Woolfe’s Jacob’s Room and James

Joyce’s Ulysses - in England in the magazine Criterion and in America in Dial (Baym et al 2037)

The poem is dedicated to Ezra Pound, who aided Eliot in the editing of the poem. Although

Eliot in an interview years after the publication of the poem stated that he “wasn’t even

bothering whether I [Eliot] understood what I was saying when writing it”(Ells 42), the

publication of the poem has been recognized as a “cultural and literary event” (Baym et al p.

2037). Why this poem is deemed to be so important and why this poem is as defining as it is

claimed to be has to do with both the contents and the structure of the poem.


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The poem is, as literary critic Steve Ellis puts it, an “extraordinary assemblage of different

parts” (Ellis 43). The poem is divided into five parts and the abrupt and disjointed nature of

the poem has become one of its notable characteristics. The poem is riddled with numerous

literary quotations, allusions and intertextual references to numerous other texts. The

narration constantly shifts between monologue and dialogue and between various narrators.

Ellis compares the poem with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, being assembled from existing

parts of other poems, and he claims that the “power and value [of the poem] lie in its teeming

disorder and anarchic energies” (Ellis 42), stemming from this assembly of different texts into

a single poem. Eliot writes in lines 21-22 that “you know only / A heap of broken images” (Eliot

2045), suggesting that the reader is left with nothing but the shards of images and that they

themselves have to assemble these images into something that can be understood. Literary

critic G. Douglas Atkins claims that the poem even is “dependent on a reader capable of

bringing another work, time or context to bear” (Atkins 81). This may be the reason for the

influence of the poem in mainstream and contemporary culture: the allusions, the anarchy

created using only previously established writers and the openness to various interpretations

made it the influential work it is known as today. With the release of the first hardcover

edition of the poem, Eliot had included various explanations for his choices in the poem, and

made footnotes for the extensive intertextual references. While some readers and critics claim

that this makes the reading of the poem more comprehensible, some critics, like Ellis, claim

that it takes away the anarchic and chaotic feeling that resides within “The Waste Land”, thus

stating that the “soul” of the poem lies in this anarchy and chaos (Ellis 42).

As earlier mentioned, the poem does not rely entirely on its form to be successful. The content

of the poem, constructed of an almost uncountable number of other contemporary and classic

texts, deals with some of the extremely pressing themes present in the beginning of the 20th

century. We will go into detail with the contents of the poem later as part of the comparison

with A Passage to India.

A Passage to India as a modernist classic

The life of E.M. Forster was completely different from that of Eliot. Forster was, as Eliot, a

scholar, but as a native Englishman his world was entirely different. He was born and raised

in the British Empire, and spent his youth traveling in continental Europe, particularly

Germany, Egypt and India, using funds he inherited from his great-aunt. He volunteered for

the Red Cross in Egypt during World War I. In the early 1920s he returned to India to work as

a secretary for the Maharajah of Dewas, and it was during these years he wrote his novel A

Passage to India. It was, accorded instant recognition and it quickly became a modern classic

(White 641). Forster explained about A Passage to India how he had “tried to indicate the

human predicament in a universe which is not, so far, comprehensible to our minds” and that

the novel “is – or rather desires to be – philosophic and poetic”(Mishra 19). This fact is very


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clear throughout the novel, and it is one of the main reasons the novel is relevant for us as

readers: A Passage to India is not only a historical novel dealing with the obvious troubles

existing during the era of the British Empire, it is a novel exploring not only the world of the

20th century but the people and their relationships, the culture, the philosophical ideas that

existed during the time of writing. This poetic nature not only ensures rich potential for

analysis of the novel, but also makes it the perfect book to compare to contemporary works.

The novel, as earlier mentioned, takes place in India in the 1920s. It revolves around the

characters Adela Quested - who travels to India to marry Ronny Heaslop – and Mrs. Moore,

Ronny Heaslop’s mother. In India they meet Dr. Aziz, a native Indian physician and Cyril

Fielding, the headmaster of a college for Indians. They also meet native Hindu professor

Narayan Godbole, who is employed at the college in which Fielding is head master. At a tea

party held by Fielding, Aziz invites the two women Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore on an

expedition to the Marabar Caves, caves that he himself has never visited, to see what is called

the “real India”. In the caves there is much confusion, and while nothing is actually explained

as to what happens in the caves, they undergo an experience, which drastically changes the

narrative and the characters. Adela Quested feels like she has been violated in the caves, and

falsely accuses Dr. Aziz, Mrs. Moore is uncomfortable in the caves and becomes distant and

apathetic after the visit, and Dr. Aziz’ entire future changes with the visit.

Similarities between the two works Critics and scholars usually treat A Passage to India with regards to its rather obvious theme

of the “Problem of India” – the easily observable conflict existing between the British Empire

and the culture that exists in India during the 1920s– early globalization, the last remnants of

colonization by the British Empire and intercultural conflicts. Considering the fact that

Forster himself traveled through India in his years of writing the novel, the critics and readers

of the novel may be right in doing just that; focusing on the “cultural clash” and the meeting

of cultures, the British paranoia and misunderstanding of spirituality. As an American

expatriate who never traveled India, Eliot quite obviously did not include this theme in “The

Waste Land”, even if his poem included Sanskrit and Buddhist references. While this may

seem to make the possible comparisons between the two works rather scarce, they still overlap

in several ways.

While the similarities in form between the two works are very few – one being a poem and

one being a novel – there are some things that seem to have some resemblance to each other.

A Passage to India is divided into three lesser parts – Mosque, Caves and Temple – each part

representing different parts of the both physical and metaphoric journey undertaken by the

main characters of the novel. Mosque is the initial meeting of the two cultures and an


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introduction to the conflict, Caves is the point-of-no-return and the first encounter with the

“real” India represented by the Marabar Caves – it is also the part of the book in which the

major conflict takes place and Temple is then redemption and the solution to this conflict.

“The Waste Land”, too, is divided into parts; five parts which all represent various themes

throughout the poem. The poem does not, however, fit into the quite the same model with

regards to narration progression as the novel does, but each part of the poem represents

various narrators, themes that evolve throughout the poem. These themes overlap greatly

between the two works, and it is these themes that now will be the main factor in our

comparison between the works.

Self-awareness

The terms “round” and “flat” characters are terms coined by Forster himself in his book

Aspects of the Novel. Forster defines the difference between the two types of character by

claiming “the really flat character can be expressed in one sentence“ (Forster Aspects pp. 67-

67), whereas the “round” character “cannot be summed up in a single phrase” (Forster Aspects.

69). In A Passage to India, the major characters show many different aspects, emotions and

inner struggles throughout the novel. If we are to use Forster’s own definition of character

analysis, the major characters of A Passage to India are “round” characters. This focus on the

multi-faceted and complex character by Forster is one of the components that makes the

novel a timeless classic: the inner life of the characters are one of the central themes of the

novel. Forster’s use of point of view, the all-seeing third person narrator, gives us, as readers,

great insight to the complex emotional lives of all the characters of the novel. The many facets

of the characters of the novel, their shifting personalities and almost post-modern qualities

are crucial to the novel. Dr. Aziz is a great example of the self-awareness present in A Passage

to India. He is torn between his portrayed and inner self: he is a kind, humorous, hospitable

person on the outside, but on the inside he is torn between India and England, feeling both

oppressed and intrigued by the presence of the British. Dr. Aziz in a conversation with fellow

Indians shares his view on the English: “Why be either friends with the fellows or not friends?

Let us shut them out and be jolly” (Forster 10), yet he befriends Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore,

and to some degree Dr. Fielding as well. He even goes so far as to admire European

architecture when visiting Fielding: “I wish I lived here […] See those curves at the bottom of

the arches. What delicacy! It is the architecture of Question and Answer!” (Forster 63-64) This

example of a torn sense of self-awareness is crucial to the novel: interpersonal relationships

and emotional life is not easily graspable in A Passage to India – it is incomplete, broken,

complicated or “muddled”. McConkey suggests that the novel portrays a world where “human

relations are illusory” and “the conscious self is capable only of a relative, unsubstantial truth

and that our [the characters of the novel] essences are but echoes, or reflections, of each other”

(McConkey 25). This idea of the characters being incomplete would ring well with Forster’s


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own ideas of fictional characters. In Aspects of the Novel he defines a fictional character as

someone who is imperfect – “they need not have glands whereas all human beings have

glands” (Forster Aspects 51) – as fictional characters are “created” it is implied they are finished

upon completion – very unlike real human beings who grow, adapt and change. The

characters of A Passage to India transcend Forster’s own ideas of “round” or “flat” as they show

a level of incompletion, implying that there is no absolute truth to these characters.

McConkey describes the characters as “rational creatures of essential good will, apt to sense

now and then something beyond ourselves that dissatisfies and perplexes” (McConkey 28).

In his book Aspect of the Novel, Forster mentions Dicken’s Mrs. Micawber – from the Charles

Dickens classic David Copperfield - as a character who is perpetually flat throughout the novel

(Forster, Aspects 68). This juxtaposition between the Victorian character and the character of

the 1920’s shows the great divide between the two literary generations. The Characters of A

Passage to India, in their imperfection, can thus be seen as a reflection of the social state of

the world in the years following World War I; a heightened sense of self-awareness and inner

life, and thus a break from the more traditional depiction of character in literature (Abrams

167).

The characters of “The Waste Land” are portrayed in a completely different, yet oddly similar

way. Several characters occur in the poem. The narrator of the poem changes character

throughout the novel – in “The Fire Sermon” he manages to be both the Fisher King of the

legend of the Grail (“While I was fishing in the dull canal” (Eliot 2050) and Tiresias (“I Tiresias,

though blind, throbbing between two lives” (Eliot 2051)). The characters are many and are

always portrayed in a disorganized way; a way that changes our perception of not only the

characters but also the poem in its entirety. Michael Levenson writes about the notion of

identity in the poem that “in The Waste Land [italics preserved] no consistent identity persists;

the “shifting references” alter our notions of the self.” (Levenson 190). This perception of

identity and its many facets is crucial to the poem – Eliot even mentions in his own notes to

the poem that Tiresias “melts into” the Phoenician Sailor (Eliot 2051), implying that characters

overlap. According to Levenson, traditional concepts of self have to be dismissed when

reading this poem (Levenson 190), as we are here dealing with something else: a new level of

self-awareness, multi-faceted or as Forster would put it, “round”.

Structure versus non-structure

One of the themes in both A Passage to India and “The Waste Land” is the contrast between

the organized and disorganized; what has been created by man and what has been

constructed by nature. In A Passage this is the contrast between the “muddle” of India, and

Europe. Fielding describes Europe, and more specifically San Giorgio in Venice as “the

civilization that has escaped muddle” (Forster 265). The word “muddle” is certainly


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significant, as it is used to describe India as a subcontinent. The description of India as Muddle

implies that it is disordered, or perhaps even confused and unsystematic.

This makes India the perfect juxtaposition to Europe: a disorganized, structureless “non-

place” as opposed to the paved sidewalks of Vienna, Paris and London, which are easily

graspable. If we apply Freudian psychology to the world of A Passage to India it seems clear

that Europe can be interpreted as the “super-ego”; structured, understandable, relatable and

controllable, whereas India is the “id”; the unknown, non-controllable and monstrous non-

structure of the human mind. This interpretation certainly adds another layer to the story of

Adela Quested and Mrs. Moore: their journey to India then becomes a journey into not only

a foreign land but into their own subconscious. During their journey they meet three major

male characters; Fielding, the open-minded, structured European stationed in India, Dr. Aziz

who, for the two women, serves as a bridge between the known and the unknown as he is the

one who invites them to see the Marabar Caves and finally Godbole, the Hindu-Brahmin, who

represents the spiritual side of India and a detachedness from humanity. Could these three

characters represent the three structures of Freud’s psychic apparatus, Fielding as the Super-

Ego, Dr. Aziz as the Ego and Professor Godbole as the Id? Interpreting the male characters as

such would certainly underline the metaphor that India, and thus the Marabar Caves as they

are the symbol of the “muddle” of India, are in itself a metaphor for the darkest places in the

human mind.

Whether or not this interpretation was the intent of Forster when writing the novel, Forster

certainly intended to portray the vast difference between the structured West and the non-

structured East. Initially, Mrs. Moore and Ms. Quested experience the Marabar Hills as being

“romantic in certain lights and at a suitable distance” (Forster 118) but the unknown

happening that occurs at the caves would suggest that the hills are far from romantic. The

caves, when attributed with a sense of romanticism, are easily approachable by the two

women. Forster writes that “These hills look romantic in certain lights and at suitable

distances, and seen of an evening from the upper veranda of the club they caused Miss

Quested to say conversationally to Miss Derek that she should like to have gone”, underlining

again an almost sarcastic contrast between the Marabar Hills. The ladies see the hills and

caves as romantic, but they will later experience that the caves are sexual and primal rather

than romantic. In the following chapter, Miss Quested reminisces about Grasmere, England:

“’Ah, dearest Grasmere!’ Its little lakes and mountains were beloved by them all. Romantic yet

manageable, it sprang from a kindlier planet. Here an untidy plain stretched to the knees of

the Marabar.” (Forster 128). Forster again juxtaposes the “manageable” with the “untidy”, the

structure with non-structure, West with East. This is further accentuated when Fielding

returns to Vienna after having stayed in India:


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“The Mediterranean is the human norm. When men leave that exquisite

lake, whether through the Bosphorus or the Pillars of Hercules, they

approach the monstrous and extraordinary; and the Southern exit leads

to the strangest experience of all” (Forster 266)

Forster describes a world where the Mediterranean, and as such the ancient cultures that

reside there, is the “Human norm”; portraying a world centered around European culture and

where the “outside”, the “non-culture” is portrayed as extraordinary and monstrous. “The

Southern exit” mentioned in the passage is the Bosphorus, a strait leading into the Black Sea

and thus the Middle East and Asia. The word “monstrous” certainly is significant, as it

describes something uncontrollable and grotesque. The word “monstrous” also has

significance in a philosophical way of thought. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche is

very famously quoted for saying: “Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does

not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares

back into you.” (Nietzsche 69) – a quote which certainly applies to the characters of A Passage

to India when the main characters of the novel are forcing their way into what is the essence

of the Indian, ancient unknown, and essentially the “abyss” of which Nietzsche speaks: the

Marabar Caves. Gertrude White describes the journey into the caves as: “a shattering

experience, calamitous to everyone” and further explains that “it destroys Mrs. Moore both

spiritually and physically; it drives Adela to the brink of madness; it threatens ruin to Aziz,

and actually alters his entire future; it imperils all relations between English and Indians; and

it destroys all constructive relationships between individuals” (White 647). The Marabar

Caves, in which this meeting between ancient unknown muddle and civilized structure

occurs, thus symbolize the great contrast; a contrast between two worlds: a contrast between

known and unknown, logic and spirit, human and nature. The Marabar Caves, when intruded

upon, fights back and changes the characters, shaking the very ground upon which the

characters stand. The Abyss of the Marabar Caves most certainly stares back into the Abyss

of the human soul, and the Nietzschean “monster” that dwells within the caves destroys

everything in its path – perhaps changing the characters into monsters themselves. Adela

falsely accuses Aziz for groping her and assaulting her, Mrs. Moore spirals into a apathetic

state from which she cannot seem to return, and Aziz’ career and reputation is almost

completely ruined.

This great contrast appears in “The Waste Land” as well, except slightly modified. “The Waste

Land” as a poem is in itself a “muddle”. Ruth Nevo explains that “there is no narrative, there

is no time, though there are “withered stumps of time”, and no place – or rather there is no

single time or place but a constant bewildering shifting and disarray of times and places”

(Nevo 455). Much like India, the timeless microcosmos described by Forster, “The Waste

Land” is in itself a timeless microcosmos; consisting of frantic glimpses and images, the poem


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takes its mystery from its form. Then where is the juxtaposition between structure and non-

structure? Nevo makes the comparison with other contemporary poets: “If we compare to the

other early stream-of-consciousness-poems […] we see at once the radicalization of the

irrational and the incoherent which has taken place. There there are personae and stories to

be descried. There are figure and ground. Here none.” (Nevo 456). “The Waste Land” is the

non-structure, the chaos and the disorder, which in A Passage to India is symbolized by India.

This makes “The Waste Land” a poem describing the world as chaotic, dry, void and empty,

even if it contains enormous cities, those cities become part of the nothingness. This is one of

the major themes of the poem: the state of the world as it exists after World War I; a world

that has been laid to waste and rebuilt, like the ancient cities of Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria,

Vienna and London (Eliot 2055).

Religion and Spirituality

Both writers deal with spirituality and religion in their works, and while Forster has more of

a “hands-on approach” to the subject – mainly dealing with the clash between people of

various religions throughout his novel and the huge gap between Christianity, Islam and

Hinduism - Eliot, as a master of his trade, uses various allusions and metaphors to deal with

the idea of spirituality and religion. If we are to find similarities between the two works, let us

look at what we know are a returning symbol of both the poem and the novel: mountains. As

we have previously established, mountains play a great metaphorical role in both works, but

not only as a contrast between culture and nature: they have great religious value as well. Eliot

raises the question in the final part of the poem What the Thunder Said: ”What is the city over

the mountains” and then answers same question with “Cracks and reforms and bursts in the

violet air / Falling towers / Jerusalem Athens Alexandria / Vienna London / Unreal” (Eliot

2055). These specific cities are mentioned with a purpose, all having been destroyed and

rebuilt, underlining the fact that these cities are weak and nothing but falling towers – fragile,

unstable and easily broken – much like the spirit of man in A Passage to India, where the spirit

of the main characters is completely broken by the visit to the Marabar Caves. Eliot points out

that cities are “unreal”, they are artificially constructed by man, and are not, as mountains are,

part of the naturally constructed world. This juxtaposition of Mountains and Cities, both great

constructs that tower over the horizon but with completely different origin, purpose and

meaning, underlines the great ancient and antique value of mountains. Eliot describes these

mountains as something dry, lonely and dead, accompanied only by a “dry thunder”:

“If there were only water amongst the rock

Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit

Here one can neither stand not lie nor sit

There is not even silence in the mountains

But dry sterile thunder without rain” (Eliot 2055)


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In “The Waste Land”, water symbolizes both life (Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves /

Waited for rain (Eliot 2056)) and death (when the clairvoyante Madame Sosostris picks the

tarot card portraying a drowned Phoenician Sailor and predicts that the narrator should “Fear

death by water” (Eliot 2046)). If water symbolizes life and death, then the mountains of “The

Waste Land” are completely void of these things. This image of mountains towering over the

skies, and as such into the heavens, raised above the clouds which rain life and death unto

Earth, are a symbol for Nirvana: a non-place void of life and death, an eternal lifeless void.

This interpretation of the significance of mountains is further underlined in final part of the

poem What the Thunder Said:

“Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves

Waited for rain, while the black clouds

Gathered far distant, over Himavant

The jungle crouched, humped in silence,

Then spoke the thunder

DA” (Eliot 2056)

This direct reference to the river Ganghes (Ganga) and the Himalaya (Himavent) Mountains

physically takes us to India. Elliot then uses the three Indian words “Datta, Dayadhvam” and

“Damyata” as onomatopoeia for the sounds of thunder, but they serve as more than just that.

Literary critic Harold E. McCarthy explains that these three words are an allusion to the

Buddhist fable Bhadaranyaka Upanisad. Bhadaranyaka Upanisad is an ancient Buddhist fable

of the true meaning of thunder. The words, spoken by the Gods during thunderstorms,

translate to “give, sympathize, control” (McCarthy 37). The Thunder can thus be interpreted

as “the voice of the Gods”, and this voice stems from the black clouds which gather over the

Himalaya Mountains – mountains which could then be interpreted as the origin of the “voice

of the gods”; a Buddhist Mount Olympus.

Forster, too, accredits mountains with great spiritual meaning. The entire narrative in A

Passage to India revolves around the Marabar Caves. These Caves are not entirely fictional; as

they are based on Forster’s own visit to the Barabar Caves, fathered by the Himalaya, situated

near Gaya in Bihar, North India (Shahane 280). Forster describes the mountains in which the

caves are located in great detail:

“They are like nothing else in the world, and a glimpse of them

makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely, without the

proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no

relation to anything dreamt or seen. To call them “uncanny”

suggests ghosts, and they are older than all spirit” (Forster 116)


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Forster shares Eliot’s view of mountains – in the case of A Passage to India the Marabar Hills

as opposed to the Himalayas of “The Waste Land” – as something extraordinary and

something that stands “above” all other creation. The statement that the mountains are older

than all spirit would suggest some sort of immortality or eternal existence, an antiquity that

does not exist anywhere else on the planet – perhaps even divinity. As in “The Waste Land”,

the fact that mountains reach into the skies is underlined (“If flesh of the sun’s flesh is to be

touched anywhere, it is here, among the incredible antiquity of these hills” (Forster 115)),

further underlining their relatedness to spirituality and religion.

Mountains occur in both “The Waste Land” and A Passage to India, and thus play a great role

in our search for similarities between these works. Sanskrit and Hindu culture, too, plays a

great role in both works. These motifs serve as great example of some of the accounts of

spirituality in both “The Waste Land” and A Passage to India. Eliot uses numerous allusions

to Buddhist and biblical texts to play with ideas of religion and spirituality, while Forster

throughout his novel deals with many of the great philosophical questions that rise when

cultures meet. Religious references are scattered all over “The Waste Land” in form of various

allusions and metaphors.

Discussion and Conclusion The modern era was extremely influential and trendsetting for literary movements during the

20th century, and even into the 21st. The writers of the era are now part of a literary canon that

is impossible to overlook when analyzing and reading modern literature. Modernism as a

social and artistic movement focused on several things and it has thus been hard to define,

but critics can agree that one of the traits of the modernist era is experimentation (Abrams

167). Modernist writers were “abandoning rules of perspective, and in literature, abandoning

a fixed point of view” (Bentley 17), which certainly was true for Eliot, and as we have learned,

for Forster as well.

As we have learned on this journey through the Waste Land to the Marabar Caves, there

certainly are similarities between the two works. But what does this tell us? Could it not be

mere coincidence that these works overlap in certain ways, or are they just a product of their

time? Ezra Pound called “The Waste Land” “The justification of the ‘movement,’ of our

modern experiment, since 1900” (Levenson 168), implying that the poem not only represents

but is the pinnacle of the high modernist movement. If “The Waste Land” has been recognized

as an archetype of the era, which it certainly has, it must exist in contemporary works. Does

it? To some degree yes. Some, if not many, of the tendencies present in “The Waste Land” -

the energy, the mystery, the flirting with non-western culture, the unstable and confusing

character cast - exist in A Passage to India as well. Critics have defined these literary


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tendencies as some of the tendencies that constitute the essence of modernism, which proves

to us two things; “The Waste Land” is indeed an archetype of the era as it contains all if not

most of these traits, and that A Passage to India then too must be part of the modernist

movement to some degree, as it contains several of these themes as well.

The two works serve as social commentary in two different continents; “The Waste Land” in

its allusions and disjointedness portrays a Europe in turmoil after World War I. Riddled with

cultural references that are scattered, torn apart and then reassembled, the poem in itself

serves as a metaphor for a Europe that has been scattered and torn apart. The wasteland

portrayed in the poem can be interpreted as Europe itself, destroyed and laid to waste. The

social commentary by Forster in A Passage to India is manifold – and although the social

commentary of the novel mainly lies on the relationship between colonial Britain and India,

there is commentary of friendship, love, hate, mystery, gender, religion and social turmoil.

Thomson writes “like The Waste Land [italics preserved], A Passage to India is a study in the

spiritual condition of the twentieth-century man” (Thomson 51). This, our study certainly

proves, is true. Through complex symbols, metaphors and literary themes, these two writers

paint a picture of the world of the 1920s, albeit on different continents, in a time where a

literary and cultural revolution is taking place.

One could discuss, however, where the actual influence comes from. Pinpointing exactly

where the poem is in the novel is difficult. There are no direct allusions or intertextual

references from A Passage to India to “The Waste Land”, and although there are similar

themes and tendencies in the works, it seems impossible to make a concrete connection

between them. Stephen Spender claims that one of the influences Eliot had in writing “The

Waste Land” is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Spender 264), which dates back to 1899,

and one could argue that Conrad’s masterpiece would be crucial to look at as a possible

contender for the prize for most influential when regards to A Passage to India as well, as

these two novels seem to share far more similarities than A Passage to India and “The Waste

Land”. On the other hand, one could argue that this shared parent of the two works underlines

their similarities and thus their shared meaning.

Nevertheless, these two works stem from the same world: a distraught, flustered, post-war

world. The writers of the time reflect this greatly in their works, and started literary tendencies

that influenced the entire literary world in an almost revolutionary way. The world of Forster

and Eliot is in a new state; a state of change; rebuilding after the war, revolution in the

colonies, a change in global economy and new ideas in philosophy and psychology. This world

is written into their works in an eloquent, masterful way that has been recognized as literary

canon ever since.


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Having now researched, analyzed and explored our way through the Marabar Caves, have we

found any sign of the Fisher King’s wasteland? Yes, we most certainly have. There are several

overlapping themes and symbols in both texts, and we can now conclude that there is a

distinct connection between the two texts. Whether or not it was the intent of Forster to

include the themes of “The Waste Land” is impossible to conclude, but Forster clearly is part

of the same era as Eliot. Critics have used “The Waste Land” as a defining factor in what

modernism can be defined as, and because of the fact that we have seen similarities between

the two texts, we can now be so bold as to conclude that Forster’s work A Passage to India is,

indeed, a modernist work, as it contains several of the traits used by critics to define

modernism. We have thus concluded that several modernist themes are apparent in both

novel and poem: changed perception of the self, perhaps in light of the World War I, new

ideas of existentialism, a new and perhaps more experimental view on religion and first and

foremost a new and bold experimentation with language, poetry and literature in sense of

theme, style and format.

Danish Abstract / Dansk Resumé Dette BA-projekt arbejder ud fra de to tekster “The Waste Land” (1922) af T.S. Eliot og A

Passage to India (1924) af E.M. Forster. Begge tekster er udgivet i tiden omkring

højmodernismen, en litterær æra der fandt sted i starten af 1920’erne. Disse to tekster er valgt

på baggrund af deres enorme og eksplosive indflydelse på samtidens og eftertidens litteratur.

“The Waste Land” er af flere kritikere blevet kaldt et af de vigtigste digte i det tyvende

århundrede. Ydermere er det af flere kritikere blevet kaldt det perfekte eksempel på, hvad

modernismen som litterær æra kan defineres som. Formålet med dette projekt er, at

sammenligne de to tekster for, at finde ligheder imellem de to tekster – ligheder i tema,

symbol og genremæssig sammenhæng. Dette gøres igennem projektet med komparativ

næranalyse af teksternes temaer og symboler. Komparativ næranalyse er et værktøj der hører

ind under hermeneutisk metode, og det er denne metode der er gennemgående for projektet.

Tekstkritikere og deres tanker om teksterne drages ind igennem projektet for at understøtte

analyser og teorier. Efter grundig analyse af hovedteksterne og deres temaer konkluderes der

på, hvor stor sammenlignelighed de to tekster har, og om disse tekster begge overholder de

kriterier for, hvad der defineres, af kritikere, kan defineres som modernisme.


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Koster, Donal N. “’The Waste Land’; A Facsmile and Transcript of the Original Drafts

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A Passage to the Waste Land: An analysis of modernism and intertextuality represented in T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India

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