Echoes in Marabar Caves (The Sound of a Waste Land)

The reason we read Waste Land closely with A Passage to India was to find semblances where India/East or more primitive cultures are being cast as being fertile and abundant in contrast with a sterile and barren Europe. This blog post stretches that connection to understand Mrs Moore’s experience inside of the Caves as being much like the effects of living in a Waste Land.

Mrs Moore finds herself extremely disenchanted by the experience inside the Marabar caves. It wasn’t anything like she’d been through before. The echoes she heard – a repeated “ou-boum” – have been described by Forster as being “dull”, “devoid of distinction” and as far as Mrs Moore is concerned, “horrid” (pages 136/137).

After the experience inside of the cave, she realizes that she’s losing interest in human interaction. “She realized that she didn’t want to write to her children, didn’t want to communicate with anyone, not even with God…she lost all interest, even in Aziz, and the affectionate and sincere words that she had to spoken to him seemed no longer hers.”  (Pages 139/140). Earlier, she feels “that though people are important, the relationships between them are not.”

Forster almost casts the Marabar Caves as being a Waste Land that Elliot has described in his poem as being a land which is alienating and completely anonymous. For Mrs Forster, the echoes appear to be unintelligible.

The echoes in the cave render anything, which is originally meaningful, void. Thus, in the cave, “everything exists, nothing has value…if one had spoken vileness in that place, or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same  - ‘ou-boum’” (page 139). This is much like how Elliot describes the Waste Land as where people lived mechanical, meaningless and mundane lives, whose dullness could be easily described in the simplest of terms (perhaps an echo would do as well) without doing any injustice to it.

To draw further parallels between the echoes of the cave and Elliot’s Waste Land, in part of the poem – Burial of the Dead, Elliot writes:

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Forster describes the echoes as being terrifying for Mrs Moore. But still she comes out of the experience without anything utterly horrific happening. Turns out she cannot find the reasons for her disillusionment. “She looked for a villain, but none was there…she realized that she was amongst the mildest individuals…and that the naked pad was a poor little baby”.

But despite that, within her, she’s overcome by a feeling of fear which cannot be explained by her experience. It’s almost as if the echoes cast a spell on her – a feeling that she cannot shake off. In an echo – a handful of dust –Mrs Moore finds a great fear, which she was previously unaware of.