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Essay on A Study of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland
More often than not a writer's concept of time necessitates certain narrative structures and creates distinct possibilities for compatible linguistic devices. To properly understand a narrative, therefore, the reader must be familiar with the writer's view of time. As Paul Ricoeur observes in writing about the "implicit equation" between "time and narrative," "The understanding of action, in effect, is not limited to a familiarity with the conceptual network of action and its symbolic mediations.( Surette, Leon)It goes so far as to recognize in action temporal structures that call for narration". In T. S. Eliot's poems, "mood, tone, and structure as well as theme are largely determined by his ideas of time" (Cuddy, Lois A., and David H. Hirsch). For Eliot, "time past" and "time future" eternally coexist in "time present," and we therefore simultaneously have in our mind the intimation of "time past" (memory) and the intuition of "time future" (desire) while dealing with any given moment in the present. In The Waste Land, Eliot employs certain linguistic modes words, phrases, symbols, images, punctuation marks, and syntactical structures in accordance with his view of temporality.( Surette, Leon)
These linguistic devices prop the thematic progression and support the temporal structure of his otherwise "broken poem" in three ways. They (a) communicate to the reader what the author means in the immediate context; (b) recall to the reader's mind memories of an earlier episode in the poem; and (c) cause the reader to speculate about a later incidence of the same experience or a similar situation in the subsequent narrative. Reading The Waste Land requires from us an awareness of the earlier incidents and anticipation of the subsequent occurrences in the text "mixing memory and desire." (Cuddy, Lois A., and David H. Hirsch)..............
