Eliot's Mythical Method

Eliot 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 to him than their symbolical meaning.

By November 1923, after THE WASTE
LAND's publication Eliot is ever more explicit about this problem.

The very title of his review in "The
Dial" of Joyce's ULYSSES makes the point: ULYSSES, ORDER AND MYTH.

He stes out to answer the challenge of
readers who, in terms used of many early readers of THE WASTE LAND,
so ULYSSES as "an invitation to chaos, an expression of feelings,
which are perverse, partial and a distortion reality".

Eliot in answer to this, calls the work
classical and complains that people HAVE UNDERESTIMATED the
IMPORTANCE of the ODYSSEY PARALLEL as a structural device.

"In using myth, in manipulating a
continous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce
is persiving a method whic others must purse after him. It is a
simply way of controlling and ordering, of giving a shape and a
significant to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which  is
contemporary history. "

T.S. Eliot's own tecnique for
presenting "the immense panorama", is different from Joyce's.

By compression and allusion he reduces
it where Joyce expands the moment almost to infinitude, but both
resord to a black-cloath of mythology.