Myth is a fundamental property of human consciousness that ensures its integrity through the integrity of world perception. Each epoch, as well as a personality, lives in the space of its myth because it holds together islands of knowledge and intuitive guesses on the verge of material and spiritual experience. It gives the key to understanding the essence of things and, in relation to literature, the inner world of the writer. Thomas S. Eliot and James Joyce were among the most eminent writers who have incorporated the myth into modernism, adding novelty to this direction. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate how Eliot and Joyce have found a way to overcome the limitations of direct experience and reveal an objective image of reality in modernistic flow.
Primarily, it is vital to characterize modernism because this paper will review how the current presentation of it was affected by Eliot’s style. Modernism is an ideological trend in literature and art of the late 19th and early 20th century, which is characterized by a departure from classical standards, the search for new, radical literary forms, and the creation of an absolutely unique style of writing works. This trend replaced realism and became the predecessor of postmodernism; the final stage of its development dates back to the 30s of the twentieth century.
The main feature of this direction is a complete change in the classical perception of the world picture: the authors are no longer carriers of absolute truth and ready-made concepts but, on the contrary, demonstrate their relativity. The narrative’s linearity disappears, replaced by a chaotic, incomplete, fragmented plot and episodes. They are often presented on behalf of several characters at once, who may have opposite views on the events taking place.
There were not many prominent authors who could combine myth and modernism and adjust these two incompatible phenomena into a masterpiece. Thomas Stearns Eliot, poet, playwright, critic, and cultural critic, was declared a classic during his lifetime and is rightfully recognized as the leading figure of Anglo-American poetry of the XX century. In the work of Thomas Stearns Eliot, the myth is one of the central semantic and structure-forming units. The mythologism of Eliot’s works became a kind of standard for modernist poetry and drama. Eliot’s creative path reflected the search for a “universal point of view” familiar to many early twentieth-century writers.
“The Waste Land” is one of Eliot’s most recognizable poems that vividly incorporates myths. It is unique in content and artistic structure, in an authentic way accumulating feelings of disappointment, awareness of general chaos, and exhaustion of vital resources themselves. The poem is in tune with the attitude of the lost generation, which made Eliot one of his first literary forerunners. However, it should be understood in a broader, metaphysical way as it is about the tragic fate of humanity. There are continuous transformations in the poem, and different people perform at different times and places (Eliot). The changes that various characters of “The Waste Land” continuously undergo emphasize the conventionality of everything that is depicted and, at the same time – the nonsense of being and the immutability of suffering on earth.
The action takes place in England after the First World War. The parts of the poem are incomplete and do not form a unity. The poem is based on the myth of the search for the Holy Grail and the legend of the poor fisherman (Eliot). This is the cup with which Christ walked around his disciples at the Last Supper. The guardians of the Grail cup were virgins, dishonored by King Arthur and his knights, for which divine retribution befell the guilty: the king’s childbearing power left, his land was struck by infertility, and the cup disappeared. The knight who finds the cup and answers the magic questions will save the king from infertility, the country from the curse and return its life-giving power to the earth.
The plot unfolds the theme of futile efforts and senseless human agitation, which equally lead to inexorable death. In associative images, Eliot recreated his ideas about the degradation of modern society, its decline, and its deathly essence (Eliot). What is more, an epigraph is written in which the myth of the Cuman Sibyl is mentioned about how she, wanting to live forever, forgot to ask for unfading youth. Over time, having grown old, Sibyl lived for centuries in the body of an old woman and she had only one desire – to die.
In the first part of the poem, “The Burial of the Deas.”, the theme of death appears. It is prophesied by the clairvoyant Sozostris: “I will show you fear in a handful of dust” (Eliot para. 1). In the second part, “A Game of Chess,” the idea sounds that life is like a game – the movement of pieces, changing situations: here, too, the author is talking about death. In the third part, “The Fire Sermon,” bones can be heard rumbling and giggling like a threat. The blind prophetess Tiresias tells about men and women who have not experienced love. The fourth stanza, “Death by Water,” narrates the drowning of Phlebas and Phoenicians. In the fifth part, “What the Thunder Said,” the poet emphasizes the theme of the death of all living things. Thunder rumbles in the arid, rocky desert, but there is no rain, and people are shackled by fear, like shackles (Eliot). The poem ends with the motif of madness and the thrice-repeated Sanskrit word “shantih” (“the world, the highest of all understanding”). It signifies that throughout the text, the spirit of death is present.
Mythologism is inherent in the poem. The author uses myths about the Holy Grail, Adonis, and Osiris. The appeal to the tale is connected with the desire to create a universal being (Eliot). The images of the barren land and the valley of bones become the leading ones. Eliot’s ironic and overcast poems differ in complexity and fragmentary form. The poem is based on the associative connection of different images, motifs, and scenes.
Like James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, which was released almost simultaneously with “The Waste Land,” Eliot based the work on a symbolic and mythological principle, the aphoristic title of the poem emphasizes the importance of an all-pervading image that grows into an symbol of the entire modern civilization. And the poet sees her stricken with an incurable disease. The poem is based on the myth of the Holy Grail – a mystical vessel that saturates people and gives them vital energy.
In the meantime, James Joyce was a pioneer who began to ruin all boundaries and classifications. He was also a harbinger of postmodernism. He, like all postmodernists, was especially fond of playing with text, which is full of games-tricks, evasions, hints-traces, quotes, pastiches, parodies, puns, turning inside out ancient archetypes (Joyce). The author does this by first learning, exploring, and delving into the “ritual” of a “category” and then exploding it from within with a stream of connotative meaning that breaks through signs honed to symbols. Joyce sets some limits and tasks and breaks them with his “textuality, his serious play with letters, words, sentences, concepts, and images (Joyce). For example, jocoserious is a keyword that Joyce repeatedly applied to his own style, in which there is a share of comedy everywhere. Still, serious content lives in any comic hint. He united in the very process of creation, writing his consciousness torn between spiritual and sensual, embodied in the pages of the text “Giacomo Joyce.”
Ulysses by James Joyce consists of 18 episodes, and the content of each episode covers approximately one hour. The plot of the novel tells about one day, June 16, 1904, in the life of an advertising agent, Leopold Bloom, who leaves home in the morning, knowing that a lover should come to his wife, Molly, around four o’clock in the afternoon (Joyce 7). All day long, Bloom, to be more precise – his physical body, does everyday things: eats a lot and expeditiously, works a little, goes to the funeral of an old friend, picks up a letter from a woman with whom he flirts by correspondence (Joyce 10). However, his brain is busy with only one thing: counting down the time to the fateful hour when he becomes a cuckold.
The second storyline is connected with Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher who constantly argues and quarrels with someone for most of the novel. Sometimes, with his neighbor in the Martello Tower, Bull Mulligan, then with the headmaster, he starts talking about Shakespeare and Hamlet in the library, which no one listens to, which makes him extremely angry. These lines intersect in the last three episodes, and they intersect not by chance: Joyce, conceiving the novel, wanted to create a modern “Odyssey” where it would be possible to “see everything in everything”(Joyce). Therefore, Bloom is associated with Odysseus himself, and Stephen is associated with his son Telemachus. Each of them goes a long way, including spiritual, so that the meeting of father and son takes place.
All three main characters of the novel have prototypes of the characters of the Odyssey myth. Joyce considered the Odyssey archetype to be the most rounded image of all world literature. In fact, Odysseus is the first of the ancient heroes whose weapon was not only physical strength but intelligence, cunning, and various skills. Homer’s Odysseus is shown in all the life roles that can fall to the lot of a man – he is a son, husband, lover, father, leader, and beggar, diplomat, and braggart. That is, the fullness of life experience is concentrated in the Odyssey, and Joyce creates such a “universal person” in the image of the main character of the novel – the Irish Jew Leopold Bloom (Joyce). Bloom’s wife Marion, or Molly, is a modern Penelope, and the closest to the author is the young hero of the novel Stephen Dedalus – respectively, a parallel to the son of Odysseus Telemachus.
For James Joyce, the Homeric myth is only a literary form. The entire content of the novel is about a new Odyssey who is afraid and does not want to return home, ironically reinterprets this old myth. According to the poet and literary critic T.S. Eliot, the myth of the Odyssey is needed by the writer in order to give the chaos of modern reality the appearance of order. Nonetheless, behind this appearance lies total skepticism and longing for the golden age of mankind, when people still believed that the world could be explained and ordered.
There is an internal, subconscious, or semi-conscious connection between these images, originating in the psychophysiological substrate of a person. Moreover, this substrate itself is deeply connected with the “cosmic” as a sphere of interpretation of the “psychophysiological” (to the connection of the micro- and macrocosm). Or else, with a different approach, the cosmic has as its substrate psychophysiological data sublimated and illuminated to the level of elements and energies of universal scale and character. In this situation, the reflection in “poetic” texts of the memory of the ancestors, of what was “before birth,” can be perceived as something immediate. They are culture and its meanings; content as a means and method of mapping the world and organizing the source material in such circumstances are irreparably delayed and adjusted only at the end of the chain. Secondarily, it would be forced to master the “natural” in the process of its “cultural” processing, which, however, is conducted in accordance with its own cultural and mythopoetic traditions and skills.
Joyce’s idea in Ulysses is to “see everything in everything.” One ordinary day turns into an epic narrative about the history of the oldest of the European capitals – Dublin, about two races, Irish and Jewish, and at the same time into an image of the entire history of humankind. It becomes a kind of encyclopedia of human knowledge and a synopsis of the history of English literature. Joyce only retains the real certainty of time and space on the narrative’s surface. Since the main action is played out in the minds of the characters, time and space in the novel acquire a universal character. Everything happens simultaneously, and everything penetrates each other. This is why Joyce needs a myth – in the myth, modernists find a fulcrum, a way to resist the torn, fragmented modernity. Myth, as a receptacle of universal properties of human nature, gives integrity to the novel and mythologized becomes a characteristic feature of modernist literature.
In conclusion, the pioneers of myth implementation in modernism were Thomas Stearns Eliot and James Joyce. The former has written a poem “The Waste Land” which symbolizes a dying culture, a state of death-in-life (the predominance of the sensual over the spiritual). The lyrical hero tries in vain to find salvation on three levels: at the level of an individual, at the level of individual social strata, and at the level of the whole society. The barren earth is the inner world of each individual and the state of all mankind. In Ulysses, Joyce took the path of overcoming the traditions of realism and naturalism by decomposing the usual narrative norms and creating a new integrity by referring to an ancient myth. Other founders of modernism have chosen other ways of abandoning tradition.
Works Cited
Eliot, Thomas. The Waste Land and Other Poems. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2021.
Joyce, James. Ulysses. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1990.