T.S. Eliot “The Waste Land” and the mythical method

T.S. Eliot composed “The Waste Land” in 1921, to publish it an year later. The masterpiece derives from the collaboration between Eliot and the American poet Ezra Pound, who decisively contributed to reduce it to its final form.

The poem is characterized by the absence of explicit logic transitions, that are substituted by parallelisms and antithesis, juxtapositions of quotations, convergences and divergences of different levels.

The first poem, entitled “The Burial of the Dead” doesn’t present an internal organization based on cause-effect logic nor a coherent structure, taking part to those literary movements that spread over Europe in the first decades of the 20^th century.

The main themes of “The Waste Land” are the concept of time, the possible ways of communication and the individual subject, in all his contradictions and shades. The poet deepens such themes through a fragmentary language, that strakes the reader, who expects the narration to be a traditional itinerary, and on the contrary he finds a narration based on the juxtaposition of different scenes linked by the same atmosphere.

Eliot exploits a composing method, that is not sequential nor mono-logical, but relational, dialogical and polyphonic. Eliot called such method the mythical method, through which he explained Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Eliot wrote an essay in order to explain to the critics of his time how Joyce composed his masterpiece “Ulysses”. He proves to be aware of the working principles of literature and of narrative techniques.  

He is interested in comparing subject and object; past and present; reality and myth; text and text in order to find innovative relations.

Mythical method

The mythical method is based on a continuous parallelism between contemporary and mythical reality.

Why did Joyce choose the mythical method? In his essay, Eliot answers the question affirming that Joyce’s mythical method has the function to order and to give shape and meaning to the infinite panorama of futilities that is the contemporary world. Therefore, Joyce and Eliot exploited the mythical method instead of traditional narration, because the contemporary world can’t be represented by narrative structures, it can’t be organized into logical-consequential sequences, determined by cause-effect principles. It means that the narrative method falls into crisis, leaving its place to a more suitable world view, to an innovative representation of reality.

The mythical method could compare each draft of sequence, juxtapose psychological systems to mythical literary paradigms and put into relations different perspectives, creating a net of inter-textuality. That’s the possibility of poetry in Eliot’s opinion. The concept of inter-textuality acquires essential importance in the modern culture of the 20^th century. “Modern poetic texts” says the psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, “build, at the same time adsorbing and destroying other texts in the inter-textual space”. That’s why modern texts are called colloquial alter-junctions, where there is no logical itinerary nor logical connections since the syntactic system has been scattered. Between the not-conjunctions proper of a self-sufficient syntax there are such alter-junctions, for which each element alludes to, contrasts, denies, parodies previous texts.   

The poetic meaning refers to other colloquial meanings, so that in the poetic period can be read various discourses. Therefore, around the poetic meaning, a multiple textual space is created, whose elements are susceptible to be integrated into the concrete poetic text. We will call such space inter-textual space.

The result is a paradigmatic effect of absorbing a multiplicity of texts and senses in the poetic message, that is concentrated around its meaning. Until the moment of conversion in 1924, that meaning consisted in the semantic paralysis of a negative present. Semantic paralysis means that language does not manage to tell the crisis anymore, it does not manage to represent the complexity of reality. Therefore, those writers subject of the literary structural crisis, can’t but incorporate the polystylism, the twisting of parody, the frequent use of allusions and quotations, the contestation of each closed system.

The origins of the mythical method must be searched in the ancient satira manipea, in the latin writer Petronio and in many contemporary artists as Swift, Bachtin and many others. In particular, Ezra Pound occupied a very relevant role in the composition of “The Waste Land”, sharing with Eliot the common ground of the mythical method. Pound became mentor of Eliot and he suggested him to cut each narrative section of the poem, reaching its essential intertextual nature.

Eliot’s method is considered innovative, an adjective that acquires an original meaning for Eliot. He states that an innovative work doesn’t consist in something new that has no relations with the past, as most people think, but in something that includes the whole tradition in its DNA. Indeed, in order to give birth to  something innovative you must have studied everything has been already created.