Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Remembering to Forget
- 1 The Sibyl and the Hanging Cage
- 2 Sibyl and the Crazed Painting
- 3 Molloy and his Mother in the Room
- 4 Dreaming in Loops in Westworld
- 5 Locating the Beginning and the End in the Triangle
- Conclusion: Losing it all in the Head
- Glossary
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Abstract
The first chapter of this book interrogates the relation of the character of the Sibyl in T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land to the semantics of temporality in a gendered and theatrical context. It interrogates the circularity of time and its unhinging effects on this woman having taken on the inexorable force of time within a shrinking spatial metaphor, and attempts to locate the Sibyl at the heart of Eliot's poem and establish her association with other women characters in the poem. The chapter also muses on the Sibyl's affair with Apollo and explores the sexuate force of temporality and how it serves as not only a force of annihilation but also a force of genesis.
Keywords: Ageing, Youth, Entrapped woman, Timelessness, Clairvoyance
Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis
vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent:
Σίβνƛƛα τί ϴέƛϵις; respondebat illa: άποϴανϵΐν ϴέƛω.
‒ T.S. Eliot, The Waste LandThis chapter will deal with the character of the Sibyl who is introduced in the Epigraph of T.S. Eliot's most famous poem The Waste Land (1922). The chapter will argue the centrality of the Sibyl's character throughout the rest of the poem, and how, despite not being explicitly mentioned in the remainder of the poem, she is straddling the spatial and temporal dynamic within and beyond the poem as an omniscient force.
As per Greek mythology, the Cumaean Sibyl was the oracle who prophesied and sang the fates of men and wrote on oak leaves. Virgil's Aeneid described her as the guide to the underworld (Hades). Ovid's Metamorphoses narrates how Apollo granted her immortality in return for her virginity. Later, when she refused him sexual favours, he allowed her to wither and wane into old age as she had forgotten to ask for eternal youth. Her shift away from her benefactor, Apollo caused her to pay a heavy price for immortality as she continued to grow tinier and feebler and was consequently kept in a jar. Eventually, like Ovid's Echo, only her voice was left.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and Temporality in Literature and CinemaNegotiating with Timelessness, pp. 31 - 44Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021