T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1000 words

T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland - Essay Example "What Tiresias sees," Eliot tells us, "is the substance of the poem." But it is the nature of Tiresias' vision that is our concern. There are three principal stories about Tiresias, all of them relevant. In Oedipus Rex, sitting "by Thebes below the wall" he knew why, and as a consequence of what violent death and what illicit amour, the pestilence had fallen on the unreal city, but declined to tell. In the Odyssey he "walked among the lowest of the dead" and evaded predicting Odysseus' death by water; the encounter was somehow necessary to Odysseus' homecoming, and Odysseus was somehow satisfied with it, and did get home, for a while. In the Metamorphoses he underwent a change of sex for watching the coupling of snakes: presumably the occasion on which he "foresuffered" what is tonight "enacted on this same divan or bed." He is often the prophet who knows but withholds his knowledge, just as Hieronymo, who is mentioned at the close of the poem, knew how the tree he had planted in his garden came to bear his dead son, but was compelled to withhold that knowledge until he could write a play which, like The Waste L and, employs several languages and a framework of allusions impenetrable to anyone but the "hypocrite lecteur." It is an inescapable shared guilt that makes us so intimate with the contents of this strange deathly poem; it is also, in an age that has eaten of the tree of the knowledge of psychology and anthropology ("After such knowledge, what forgiveness"), an inescapable morbid sympathy with everyone else, very destructive to the coherent personality, that (like Tiresias' years as a woman) enables us to join with him in "fore suffering all." These sciences afford us an illusion of understanding other people, on which we build sympathies that in an ideal era would have gone out with a less pathological generosity, and that are as likely as not projections of our self-pity and self-absorption, vices for which Freud and Frazer afford dangerous nourishment. Tiresias is he who has lost the sense of other people as inviolably other, and who is capable neither of pity nor terror but only of a fascination spuriously related to compassion, which is merely the twentieth century's special mutation of indifference. The "dissociation of sensibility" cataloged by Eliot's imagery traces the dissociation of individual senses from each other in the absence of any intellectual Aufhebung into a logos. There is a great irony, for example, in Eliot's assertion that "what Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem." Tiresias' blindness should, according to myth, grant him a vision of the truth. What he "sees" in Eliot's poem is a troping of the primal scene in the mechanical copulation of the typist and the young man carbuncular. The metric, the rhyme scheme, and the ending sight of the "automatic hand" that "puts a record on the gramophone" enforce a feeling of remorseless repetition of a scene "foresuffered" a thousand times in memory and desire. Tiresias endlessly sees the scene of the crime, the origin of his own "blinding" or castration in witnessing the difference between men and women. What Tiresias sees is "substance" itself, physical life (or signifiers) unredeemed by spirit (or a tran scendental signified). Eliot's note plays on the philosophic sense of "substance" as essence and tacitly reminds us of its declension into mere matter. In some legends, Tiresias loses his eyes in retaliation for looking upon the naked body of the bathing Athena, goddess of wisdom. In the version from Ovid that Eliot quotes as "of great anthropological interest," we have

Understanding Human Behavior & Prejudice can be hurtful and Essay

Understanding Human Behavior & Prejudice can be hurtful and destructive - Essay Example Understanding Human Behavior & Prejudice can be hurtful and destructive The key reason behind the understanding of human behaviour is that all the individuals in an organization cannot be the same in terms of nature, behaviour, personality and attitude (Freeman, 1999, p.229). The modern theories of human behaviour are based upon the differences in each and every individual within an organization. Before the study proceeds to realize and understand the human behaviour, it is important to determine what the human behaviour actually means. Behaviour is specific responses that can be observed directly or indirectly (Griffin and Moorehead, 2011, p.19). Indirect observations can be executed through the attitudes and decision making process of the leaders. On the other hand, direct observation process can be executed through understanding the responses of the individuals in a particular work or organizational environment (Martin, 2005, p.104). This organizational human behaviour process is quite unpredictable and critical to understand. The human behaviour can be classified into three components: motivated behaviour, goal oriented behaviour and caused behaviour. Human behaviour is the factor that depends upon the inner emotion of the individuals, such as anger, motivation, joy and sorrow (Henderson, 1996, p.195). It is important for the leaders to understand the past organizational behaviour in order to make any kind of decision or implement a strategy in the organizational human resource management process (Hernandez and O’Connor, 2009, p.12). ... Each and every individual has a distinctive combination of several characteristics, as behaviour is the outcome of interaction between the environmental and individual characteristics (Dutt, 2008, p.5). Some of these characteristics develop over time or present from the time of birth. These characteristics are known as learned and inherited. Some characteristics (Clawson and Bevan, 2008, p.9) and behaviour types have been provided in the following table: Characteristics Behaviour Relationship Conflict Tolerance Perception about role conflict Huge tolerance for limited role conflict. Significance of Job satisfaction Leaders express intrinsic rewards versus extrinsic less job satisfaction. Work Ethic Attendance Strong value and work ethic related with high work attendance. Interest Diversification Compensation and Salary Measurement Higher interest of performance diversity. Locus of Control Job stress experience Huge stress with external and emphasized locus of control. In order to und erstand the human behaviour, the leaders or managers should understand the Psychoanalytical model. Psychoanalytical model is based upon the ego, id and super ego. Ego generally represents the conscious stage of an individual. On the other hand, id represents the inner pleasure of an individual (Denisi and Griffin, 2005, p.21). Id in an individual can be both constructive and destructive. Destructive tendency of individuals can be dominating, aggressive and fighting (Cardwell and Flanagan, 2003, p.144). Throughout the life of an individual, id generally comes in a conflict with ego. On the other hand, ego depends upon the super ego. In terms of super ego, an individual cannot be aware about the functions of super ego (Guindon, 2010, p.71). Super ego generally represents