low spoiler: scene from Chapter 28 discussed with some lines quoted
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot is more guidebook than poem in Katabasis by R.F. Kuang. Eliot’s text is sparingly used by magicians to plan trips to Hell. It has “some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record.”1
Katabasis characters think The Waste Land’s scholarship is problematic (a bit too “self-referential”), so its validity is pretty disputed. Information from The Waste Land is only used once in the book—such a paltry amount compared to the dozens of times Orpheus and Dante come in handy.
Despite its general irrelevance, The Waste Land becomes very important textually in Chapter 28 of Katabasis. In this chapter, the narrator starts hiding quotes from the poem in plain sight.
Let me set the scene in Chapter 28: Alice Law, the main character, has made it to the 8th and final court of Hell. She’s in the city of Dis (a Dante’s Inferno reference), exploring a part of the city known as the Rebel Citadel. On page 436, she finds a courtyard with a grove of sentient, withered branches sticking out of the ground. Each branch is a Shade (what souls are called in Katabasis).
Alice’s experience in this grove merges with several landscape depictions in The Waste Land. Here Katabasisexponentially expands on kernels from Eliot’s verse with new story. Over the course of eight pages, four quotes from The Waste Land are quietly melded to the Katabasis narrative.
Below, I’ve listed the allusive moments in Chapter 28 out, along with the quotes from The Waste Land.
Allusion 1. Stones & No Sound of Water
- Katabasis, Chapter 28, p 438: “There was something terrible about leaves with no rustle, stones with no sound of water.”
- The Waste Land, I. The Burial of the Dead: “And the dry stone no sound of water. Only”
- The Waste Land, V. What the Thunder Said: “A pool among the rock / If there were the sound of water only”
Allusion 2. The Agony of Stony Spaces
- Katabasis, Chapter 28, p 438-9: “[…] the greatest horror of all, and that the agony of stony spaces. Where all was silent and you could not run from the thunder of your mind.”
- Katabasis, Chapter 28, p 442: “They come in agony […] they learn the calm of stony places […]”
- The Waste Land, V. What the Thunder Said: “After the frosty silence in the gardens / After the agony in stony places“
Allusion 3. That Heap of Broken Images
- Katabasis, Chapter 28, p 442: “[…] keeping the flickering at the fore, and that heap of broken images dimly in the back.”
- The Waste Land, I. The Burial of the Dead: “A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,”
Allusion 4. Withered Stumps of Time
- Katabasis, Chapter 28, p 443: “No growth here. Just withered stumps of time.”
- The Waste Land, II. A Game of Chess: “And other withered stumps of time“
If I hadn’t recognized these four lines as quotes from The Waste Land, the glaring clue that this scene is based on the poem comes at the chapter’s end when the narrator says “waste land”1 Eliot’s way (with a space) instead of wasteland (one word) like it is elsewhere in the text.2
Some Reflections and Analysis of This Allusion
On BookTok and Bookstagram, a common criticism of Katabasis is how the story feels full of telling not showing, info-dumping, and erudite namedropping. This is all true. Philosophy, math, and literature are explained and cited throughout the text.
Which begs the question: Why does a forthcoming narrator let sustained literary allusions hide in plain sight in the Citadel scene?
One interpretation of mine has to do with demonstrating fatigue. Alice and the narrator are tired. They are near the end of this story when this scene takes place. They’re grieving [character’s name redacted] while running on fumes. Perhaps, they don’t have the narrative energy at this point to stop and give us a full explanation about The Waste Land references. They just hope we get it.
Or maybe, if it’s not fatigue, the narrator is inviting us to play a literary game. The hidden-in-plain-sight allusions to The Waste Land are uniquely challenging. Fully explained literary references come up all the time in Katabasis, as do other explained games, puzzles, and riddles. Only the simpler challenges, like wordplay, exist in plenty without explanation. The bigger stuff is always explained. But Chapter 28’s hidden references to The Waste Land? That’s harder than the book’s typical wordplay challenge.
Something else is unusual about these allusions. Technically, The Waste Land is a guidebook for Hell. All the guidebook texts (Orpheus, Dante, Aeneas) are normally named and discussed outright. The Citadel scene is one of the few times where a guidebook text is presented without ceremony. For whatever reason, Alice and the narrator are letting readers figure it out in Chapter 28 without whispering the answers in our ear.
My favorite part about The Waste Land being in the Citadel scene is that Katabasis creates a whole new story from Eliot’s cryptic landscape details. At the scene’s end, when Alice refuses to give up and take root in the grove, she is vocal about it and loud enough to wake up a Shade below her feet. This spirit rises (still looking like a tree or maybe one of Tolkien’s humanoid Ents) and runs out of the grove. Alice follows and watches the Shade hurl themselves over a cliff into the sweet oblivion of The Lethe’s waters below the grove.
I admire this moment in the text because the water details are so aligned with Eliot’s poem, where water is desired deeply but never had. At the end of The Waste Land, just a bit of water could offer the cacophony of voices in the poem relief, but the speaker can’t provide water, the physical stuff anyway. So, the speaker does the next best thing. They supply water in poetic form through sound with onomatopoetic lines that are wet-sounding enough to sate.
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
– The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot from V. What the Thunder Said
But Katabasis‘ narrator has the chance to provide actual water to a desicated character. The Shade submerges themself in Hell’s magical river below the grove and dissolves. By comparison, Eliot’s sojourn to this grove in Hell must have been uneventful. No spirits woke up. Maybe Eliot could not even hear The Lethe down below and so close by.
Last thing about this allusion: The biographical similarities between the real T. S. Eliot, the real R.F. Kuang, and the fictional Alice Law are charming. All were raised in the United States (Eliot in the midwest, Kuang in Texas, Law in Colorado). All attended a prestigious U.S. university for undergrad and then made their way to an Oxbridge college in London for graduate studies. The three are loosely aligned, just as Katabasis and The Waste Land are too.
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