New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 147Tarot cards, by which men have tried to foresee and manipulate destiny while
waiting for its inevitable arrival. It is the consciousness of the poem blending
imperceptibly with the protagonist’s consciousness that makes us aware of
what the protagonist can only know unconsciously.
As in Arnold’s poem, the characters are, in spite of themselves, living
their buried life; but they do this not only through personal, but also through
racial memory, through unconsciously making rituals even when they think
they have abolished all rituals. Similarly, the personal libidinal associations of
music and hyacinths in “Portrait of a Lady” become in The Waste Land
unconscious memories of ancient rituals and myths. The poem’s awareness
makes us remember consciously what the protagonist, in recalling the
Hyacinth garden, remembers unconsciously—that Hyacinth was a fertility
god.
When Eliot, in reviewing Ulyssesfor The Dialof November 1923, said
that Joyce had discovered in the “continuous parallel between
contemporaneity and antiquity” a way of giving shape and significance to
modern “futility and anarchy,” he surely had in mind his own method in The
Waste Land,published like Ulyssesthe year before and possibly influenced by
it since Eliot read the latter part in manuscript in 1921 when he was just
beginning The Waste Land.^7 This “mythical method,” as Eliot called it, allows
the writer to be naturalistic, to portray modern chaos, while suggesting
through psychological naturalism a continuing buried life that rises
irrepressibly into those shapes which express the primal meeting of mind
with nature. Since the parallel with antiquity appears as unconscious
memory, it is psychologically justified and cannot be dismissed as mere
literary appliqué.The parallel is grounded in that conception of mind as
shading off into unconsciousness which, having come from romantic
literature, was articulated by Freud and Jung and remains still our
conception, indeed our experience, of mind. The mythical method gives a
doubleness of language to parallel our doubleness (doubleness between the
apparent and buried) of consciousness and selfhood.
This doubleness of language reaches a climax at the end of Part I, “The
Burial of the Dead,” which deals with the sprouting of seed and tubers in
spring. In one of the poem’s most powerful passages, the protagonist
recognizes an old acquaintance; and just as in “Prufrock” we are to infer the
small talk at the party, so here we are to infer an ordinary conversation about
gardening. But the language tells us what is unconsciously transpiring.
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying:
“Stetson!