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

The Waste dry land Truth with Complexity       The basic method intentiond in The Waste Land may be described as the application of the principle of complexity. T S Eliot uses a parallel structure on the out-of-doors to obtain an ironic contrast, and then uses surface contrasts in a parallel form. To the reader, this gives the magnetic core of chaotic experience ordered into a new whole, though the hard runed surface of experience is faithfully retained.   The fortune-telling of The Burial of the Dead will adorn the general method very satisfactorily. On the surface of the poesy the poet reproduces the ptyalise 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 for each one of the details (justified realistically in the palaver of the fortune-teller) assumes a new subject matter in the general context of the poem. There is then, in addition to the surface irony, something of a Sophoclean irony too, and the fortune-telling, which is taken ironically by a twentieth-century audience, buy the farms align as the poem develops--true in a sense in which Madame Sosostris herself does not think it true. The surface irony is thus reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her speech have plainly one reference in terms of the context of her speech the man with three staves, the one-eyed merchant, the crowds of people, walk round in a ring, etc. But transferred to other contexts they become loaded with special meanings. To sum up, all the central tokens of the poem head 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 emerge 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 ev ery symbol had a single, unequivocal meaning but the poem would be thinner, and little 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 stand for dramatized instances of the base of operations, embodying in their own nature the fundamental paradox of the theme.   We shall better generalise why the form of the poem is right and inevitable if we compare Eliots theme to Dantes and to Spensers.