The Mythical Method

The mythical method is a literary technique, which is highly intertextual in that it models modernist texts on archaic myth and thus creates the impression that past and present are fused. The term was introduced by T. S. Eliot in 1923 in his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses entitled “Ulysses, Order and Myth”, where he states:

In using the myth, in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity, Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him. […] It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. […] Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method. It is, I seriously believe, a step toward making the modern world possible for art.” (Eliot, “Ulysses, Order and Myth” 178)

Thus, by using the mythical method and evoking the past, depth and meaning is provided to the work of art. The past can be seen as “an underneath semi-transparent multi-layered stratum on a painting where the two would be present” (Nasi 2): meaning present and past. Besides the temporal depth added through the mythical method, another function of this technique is to structure the literary text more freely than the narrative method allows, which is achieved through the introduction of a symbol network that provides structure as well as meaning (3). Furthermore, the mythical method establishes a certain relationship between the old and the new texts and thus “provide[s] a basis for comparison, serving to the ironic dimension of the new work” (3). Eliot himself made use of this method in his poem The Waste Land (1922) by making numerous references to sources of different origins including archaic myths. In his explanatory notes on his poem, he states for example:

Not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem were suggested by Miss Jessie L. Weston’s book on the Grail legend: From Ritual to Romance. (Eliot, The Waste Land, 21)

and

To another work of anthropology I am indebted in general, one which has influenced our generation profoundly; I mean The Golden Bough; I have used especially the two volumes Adonis, Attis, Osiris. Anyone who is acquainted with these works will immediately recognise in the poem certain references to vegetation ceremonies. (21)

All these references add to the complexity of the poem, carry meaning and function as structural elements. Through the mythical method past and present both interact and fuse in the literary work: “[…] the mythical method is the juxtaposition of two levels of awareness, two planes of reality, at once similar and different: the meaning is the transaction between them” (Donoghue 211).

The mythical method can also be seen as a reaction to its historical, political, and societal background, a time “in which the evolutionary model –and its attendant notion of “progress”– […] was cracking under the ever-intensifying pressure from the very forces that produced it” (Schwartz 25) and thus was perceived as futile and anarchical, as Eliot himself has noted. “He believed that the futility and anarchy of contemporary history could be redeemed for a work of literature only by showing contemporary events in the critical light of a myth” (Donoghue 208).

References

Donoghue, Denis. "Yeats, Eliot, and the mythical method." The Sewanee Review 105.2 (1997): p. 206-226.

Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth”. Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Harcourt, 1975 . Eliot, T. S., and Michael North. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001.

Nasi, Manjola. “The mythic method and intertextuality in TS Eliot’s poetry.” European Scientific Journal 8.6 (2012): p. 1-8.

Schwartz, Sanford. "Eliot's ghosts: Tradition and its transformations." A Companion to TS Eliot (2009): p.15-26.