Notes of the 12^th of March 2012

Eliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological materials) as a potential means of ordering and transforming into significant contemporary experience. Their technical function seems to have been more important to him than their symbolic meaning. By November 1923, after The Waste Land publication, Eliot is even more explicit about this problem. The very title (Ulysses, Order, and Myth) of his review in “The Dial” of Joyce’s Ulysses makes the point. He sets out to answer the challenge who readers do, in terms used by many early readers of The Waste Land, saw Ulysses as "an invitation to chaos, an expression of feelings which are perversed, partial and a distorsion of reality". Eliot, in answer to this, calls the work "classical" and complains that people had underestimated the importance of the Odissey parallel as a structural device.

"In using myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr Joyce is pursuing a method
which others must pursue after him.
It is simply a way of controlling and ordering, of giving
A shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility
And anarchy which is contemporary history"

 T. S. Eliot's own technique for presenting "the immense panorama" is different from Joyce's.
Eliot's use of myth: by compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to infinitude, but both resort a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in share.