Ellot's Mythical Method

Elliot sees myth and ritual (the use of anthropological material) as a potential means of ordering and transforming in to significant contemporary experience.

Their technical function seems to have been more important ti him than their symbolic meaning(1).

By(2) november 1923, after The Waste Land's publication Elliot is even more explicit about this problem.

The very title of his review in "The Dial"(3) of Joyce's Ulysses makes the point: Ulysses, order and myth.

He sets out to answer the challenge of the readers who in terms used by many early reader of The Waste Land, so Ulysses as "an invitation to chaos, an expression of feelings which are perverse, partial and a distortion of reality".

Elliot, in answer to this, calls the work classical and complains that people have underestimate the importance of the Odyssey paralel as a structural device.

“In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity

and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him”.

Then comes the famous remark which seems to be a comment on his own The Waste Land:

“It is simplya way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a significance

to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.

Eliot’s own technique for presenting, the “immense panorama” is different from Joyce’s. By compression and allusion he condenses it where Joyce expands the moment almost to infinitude, but both resort to a black-cloth of mythology to hold their material in share(4).

1. because myth hold together all the episodes

2. by = time value

3. "The Dial" is an American magazine of literature

4. to hold, held, held = temporary

   to keep, kept, kept = permanent