A Method in the Madness of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land: A Paradigmatic Reading

Abstract

The paper attempts to create some form of order in the otherwise ‘disorderly’ poem by T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land. For this, it borrows the method of oppositional thinking from structuralism, especially as propounded by Claude Levi Strauss’ essay ‘The Structural Study of Myth’. Thus the paper tries to answer the question -- How can the disparate signs in The Waste Land be organised as a systematic network?

The researcher hypothesises that The Waste Land can be read as a myth to facilitate the deployment of Levi-Strauss’ method. The main signifiers in the poem can then be organised as paradigms or bundles of relations under two primary contradictions addressed by the poem. She refrains from using Levi-Strauss’s term ‘mytheme’ because the signifiers in this poem lack the chronological relationship required for identifying mythemes. She hypothesises that the two contradictions addressed by the poem are - the contradiction between premodernity and modernity, the contradiction between life and death.