Fisher Kings, Grail Quests, and the Mythic Method

     T. S. Eliot’s most celebrated work, "The Wasteland" (1922) is, among many other things, a modernist reworking of a Grail quest with overlapping metaphors of a Fisher King, a Drowned King, and the eponymous Wasteland. In this combination of imagery, Eliot was following the model of literary scholar Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance (1920). Weston argued that the “‘Waste land’ is really the very heart of our problem; a rightful position of its position and significance will place us in possession of the clue which will lead us safely through the most bewildering mazes of the fully developed tale” (60) [1]. Weston’s most influential (if historically unsubstantiated) claim is that behind Christian Grail quests lies a more universal fertility cult in which one king dies and another takes over and, as Perceval declares in Excalibur, “The king and the land are one.” Boorman, like Weston, suggests that the idea of land laying waste for 1000 years until the days of Camelot is a “poetical version of the disappearance from the land of Britain of… [a pagan nature ritual] that lingered on in the halls and mounts” (173).
     In the introduction for "The Wasteland," Eliot acknowledges his close debt: “Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance (Cambridge). Indeed, so deeply am I indebted, Miss Weston’s book will elucidate the difficulties of the poem much better than my notes can do; and I recommend it (apart from the great interest in the book itself) to any who think such elucidation of the poem worth the trouble.”
    The next year, Eliot celebrated a "mythic method" epitomized by James Joyce's Ulysses (1921): “Psychology (such as it is, and whether our reaction to it be comic or serious), ethnology, and [Frazer’s] The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible even a few years ago. Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythic method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art” [2].
    Boorman pursued a version of this “mythic method” throughout his career.