Waste Land Essay: Truth through Complexity :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The xerox Land Truth through Complexity       The basic method used in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity. T S Eliot uses a parallel structure on the come up to stop an ironic contrast, and then uses get hold contrasts in a parallel form. To the reader, this gives the effect of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is faithfully retained.   The fortune-telling of The Burial of the Dead will illustrate the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poem the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface irony the contrast between the original use of the Tarot cards and the use made by Madame Sosostris. But each of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new meaning in the general context of the poem. There is then, in addition to the surface irony, something o f a Sophoclean irony too, and the fortune-telling, which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience, becomes true as the poem develops--true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does not think it true. The surface irony is thus change by reversal and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her speech have only one reference in terms of the context of her speech the man with three staves, the one-eyed merchant, the crowds of people, walking round in a ring, etc. But transferred to other contexts they become loaded with special meanings. To sum up, all the central symbols of the poem promontory up here but here, in the only section in which they are explicitly bound together, the binding is slight and accidental. The deeper lines of association only write out in terms of the total context as the poem develops--and this is, of course, exactly the effect which the poet intends.   The poem would undoubtedly be clearer if every symbol had a single, haugh ty meaning but the poem would be thinner, and less honest. For the poet has not been content to develop a didactic allegory in which the symbols are two-dimensional items adding up directly to the sum of the general scheme. They represent dramatized instances of the theme, embodying in their own nature the fundamental paradox of the theme.   We shall better understand why the form of the poem is accountability and inevitable if we compare Eliots theme to Dantes and to Spensers.