the arid plain behind me

Today the briefest of quotations - the lines from the final part of 'The Wasteland' where the poetic voice speaks in the persona of the wounded king:

I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?

A good question to ask while the float is on the water. In the midst of the wasteland, can each of us find some trace of order? Is that at least attainable? Is that all we can hope for?

more on the fisher king

I've done a bit more reading on the story of the Fisher King and I also listened to an edition of In Our Time on the subject. (I've put the link at the end of this post.) I'm actually quite gratified to find that a few of things I said in my last post weren't entirely stupid.

First, I talked about my sense that fishing was the 'wrong' activity for a legendary king and, yes, it seems that in the medieval versions the king's wound quite obviously prevents him from taking part in the appropriate aristocratic pursuits, riding and hunting in particular. Fishing as the poor relation to hunting seems a familiar idea and we might think of the early sections of the The Compleat Angler, where Piscator, Venator, and Auceps debate the relative merits of their individual 'recreations'. The modesty of fishing is a part of its meaning here - stillness rather than movement, sitting on the bank and not on horseback.

Second, I also wrote about my sense of a connection with the story of the Salmon of Knowledge and, again, it seems that this has received a lot of attention. The Victorian period in particular saw an attempt to elucidate the relationship between the medieval poetry and the stuff of Celtic myth. But the tenor of the radio discussion was very much that, although the writer of the original medieval poem, Chrétien de Troyes, may well have had access to Celtic material, not least through contact with the culture of Brittany, it is almost impossible to establish the nature of the connection clearly. There are similarities with the story of Bran from the Welsh mythological source, the Mabinogi. But, as one of the contributors - Carolyne Larrington - said, the story of Bran is 'light on fishing', and, anyway, the Mabinogi itself has a fragmentary quality. There isn't really a monolithic corpus of myth to work from. The Victorians desperately wanted to find a relationship - and certainly the idea that fishing is in some way symbolic of the pursuit of wisdom does seem to be a line of connection. But the connections are dark and difficult to follow.

Third, I worried a little about the relationship between the Fisher King himself and Parsifal who is charged with healing him. Fishing seems to represent an attempt to change things - the pursuit of something hidden and elusive. But is is Parsifal who is destined to bring about that change - the king cannot do this on his own. The relationship is complex and it's interesting that in Eliot's poem, 'The Wasteland, there isn't really a Parsifal figure. The fisherman sits by the canal in the early lines of the 'Fire Sermon' and is still there as we come to the end of 'What The Thunder Said', although, during the radio programme, Stephen Knight referred to the three Sanskrit terms that appear just before the refrain of shantih, shantih, shantih. They are Datta (giving alms), Dayadhvam (self control), Damyata (compassion) and come from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. These, he suggested, are pretty much the qualities that Parsifal is expected to display.

All in all, I'm struck by how the elements of the tale - the king, the wound, the grail, the knight, the act of fishing, the state of the kingdom, and so on - fit together differently in each retelling and resist any very straightforward reading. The pieces enter into relationships that produce suggestions of meaning in excess of the rather simple interpretive frames we often want to bring to them. They are, dare I say it, like fish in the water and, as Johan said when we last met, you cannot keep fish in plain view and then bear down on them with a weapon. You have to create the conditions for them to come to you and ultimately catch themselves.

Parzival-Darstellung Washington (D.C.), Libr. of Congress, Rosenwald Collection, Ms. 3, Bl. 6v, beginning of the 15th century.

the fisher king

I've been putting this off but it needs to be done. There is so much material on the legend of the Fisher King and it ranges so widely across historical periods and narrative genres that incorporating it into this discussion is a very daunting task. But, as I say, it needs to be done, so today I shall make a start by outlining the story and writing a little about what we should be looking for in the many incarnations of the legend.

The Fisher King is the keeper of the Grail but, like other keepers of legendary artefacts - Philoctetes, for example, on whom Heracles bestowed his mighty bow and arrows - he is also afflicted with a terrible wound, as if the gift must be counter-balanced by some powerful sense of suffering. And so the king goes out fishing while his kingdom falls apart - turns into a wasteland - around him. The hero chosen to heal the king is Percival - or Parsifal - although in later versions of the story he becomes the companion of Galahad, who now moves to centre stage. A great deal of work has gone into unpicking and interpreting the legend of the wounded king but, for the purposes of this project, I think we need to focus on what it means that the king is a fisherman. Is that itself of significance, and, if it is, then how is it to be understood?

This brings us in turn to the question of what the fish themselves signify, for - whatever it is - the king is characterised by his pursuit of it. There is, of course, no key that will unlock the symbolism and confer upon the legend a fixed and stable meaning. Each version has its own understanding of the king's pursuit and this is what we need to work with. But stucturally the act of fishing has a quality of doubleness. On the one had, it seems the wrong activity for a king - too small a pursuit - and it is a sign of his afflection that he is reduced 'merely' to catching fish. But, on the other hand, it gestures towards the search for that which will restore some sort of wholeness to the world of the king - it is the act that might mediate between the ruinous conditions of the present and the possibilities of the future.

As I write this, it strikes me that there is something very Blochian at work in the 'dark present' of the king's condition in which are contained the traces of future possibility. But what needs some thought is that fact that the king is both subject and object - agent and patient - in the story that unfolds around him: the subject or agent of whatever the pursuit of fish symbolises, but - in the end - the object or patient of Parsifal or Galahad's heroism. The story is resolved through the emergence of another hero (and here I feel shades of Finn and Finegas, although I hardly dare to think about it).

At any rate, there is a conundrum here that I'd like to look at and which I'll return to in a few days, perhaps with more to say.

I like this drawing of the Fisher King by William T. Ayton - I'm linking to the blog rather than posting it because it's copyright. Do go and have a look.