No More Leeches In Nature: Pentheus’ Decaying Corpse In Beckett’s Endgame, And Eliot’s Waste Land

Abstract

Wordsworth’s metaphorical definition of the poet’s inspiration to the leeches in the moors in his poem Resolution and Independence illustrates the vital interdependency between man and nature. The permeation of the energy circulated in the form of Yeatsian gyre creates organicity based on the interdependence and interconnection between species and the nature. The relation between man and nature which once was an intrinsic one as a living whole just like the soul to the body which Plato calls  “anima mundi†and which Wordsworth emphasized in leech gathering episode now has given way to dissociation of the organic whole into dead mechanical parts. Nature has been stripped of its animistic spirit and regenerative power. Consequently, the leeches, the symbols of world spirit that have lost this renewal power, are no more found in nature. That is, nature can’t complete its death and rebirth cycle in absence of anima mundi. But Man himself turn into bloodsucking leech in the mechanical culture upon nature he has built with his bloodthirsty desire to dominate over everything. The civilization he calls it that is built upon nature is treated as a corpse in laboratory. Seeing the nature as the patient etherized upon the table, he, mankind, categorized, classified, and anatomized the nature by dismembering each part of nature just like King Pentheus being torn into pieces in Euripides’s play Bacchea. But he is not aware of masochistic suffering he has done to his inner nature since he has been intoxicated with science illusory power. This paper will be twofold. The first attempt will be to inform the reader about the reciprocal relation between man and ecology centering on religious and scientific perspectives toward nature, and secondly it will aim to show nature’s desire to have death and rebirth cycle which it lost as a result of man’s outrageous actions and how it underwent to never ending rottenness like old, wrinkled Tithonus in the works of Samuel Beckett’s Engame, and T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land.