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

The Waste Land Truth through Complexity       The basic mode intentiond in The Waste Land may be expound as the application of the principle of complexity. T S Eliot uses a analog structure on the get hold to let out an ironic contrast, and then uses surface contrasts in a parallel form. To the reader, this gives the effect of chaotic experience enjoin into a new whole, though the realistic surface of experience is dependably retained.   The fortune-telling of The Burial of the Dead will illustrate the general method genuinely satisfactorily. On the surface of the meter the poet reproduces the patter of the charlatan, Madame Sosostris, and there is the surface mockery 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) as resumees a new centre in the general linguistic context of the poesy. There is then, in addition to the surface badinage, something of 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 reversed and becomes an irony on a deeper level. The items of her destination affirm 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 head up here provided here, in the only section in which they are explicitly rebound 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 i f every symbol had a single, unequivocal 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 right and inevitable if we compare Eliots theme to Dantes and to Spensers.