View source for Originality: Understanding and Novelty

To best understand how T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland stands in relation to originality, we must first delve into the notion of originality in literature. The question we must ask ourselves, is, what’s the point of literature? John Erskine boils this down to two possibilities. One is to portray the individual, the other to reflect human nature. On the one hand, one could use literature to display their own novelty, their difference from other authors or people. In doing so these authors commit themselves to striking first in a vein with every work produced. On the other, one could use literature to bind themselves and their generation to the ideas of others. In this way literature becomes timeless, free of novelty.  Right away, we come to understand that Elliot falls into the latter category or poet. His aim is not to demonstrate how different he is from his people, but how deeply he understands their pain and its roots. 
 
" The achievements of literature are all, as in these instances, a gradual reworking of traditional or popular or folk material, and in the process it is precisely because the subject is not original that the audience can decide how well it has been portrayed. A sequence of writers interpreting life are therefore like a succession of virtuosos playing the classics, each trying to give us the true Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann. Their renderings will be different enough, but the music is the same, and we know it by heart. The player who calls our attention to most beauty in it, will be original or unique in the only way that art permits.” (Erskine 737).

What is shown by the comparison of music and poetry is that poets are not composers of music, insofar as, they do not create any life but their own. They are musicians, putting the notes of life in an order that produces a feel. While one may be familiar with a lick, or a phrase, the artist producing them will do so in his or her own way. Or as Erskine puts it, “it is only in a figure of speech that art declines or prospers, it is the artists who are less competent or more so than their predecessors, and the poet who tells us that the period before him is at an end, is really proclaiming that he cannot improve upon it, and if the other poets are like himself, the preceding period is indeed ended” (Erskine 739).
If we apply what Erskine is saying to Elliot’s “The Wasteland” we come to understand the genius of the work. The poem itself is an amalgamation of the past. Its use of historicized phrases commits itself to the works before it. As if Elliot were conceding that these former works are not only unable to be improved upon but also instrumental in understanding art and literature of the time. Look to the second stanza’s opening lines, 
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow	 
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,	  
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only	 
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,	

This here seems to be a comment on originality in itself, as if to say that originality is a fruitless pursuit. From this excerpt it would seem that Elliot is comparing the modern creation of poetry to putting a puzzle together, however each artist is missing certain pieces; for Elliot though, that doesn’t seem to hinder the proliferation of his craft, but only informs it.

If we look to other pieces in Elliot’s canon, we see a trend form. In his “Four Quartets”, Elliot seems to draw his audience to a similar notion, as in the second stanza of part II,

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;                                                            Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,                                                                                            But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,                                                                          Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,                                                         Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,                                                                                There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.                                                                                           I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.                                                                                   And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Elliot seems to be caught up in the paradoxical nature of progress. While it does feel like society is moving forward, it is also inexorably linked to the past, unable to remove itself from itself. It seems feasible to argue that Elliot certainly stuck to a certain kind of theme, but his playfulness is shown by the different modes he expresses it. While the “Four Quartets” and “The Wasteland”  both seem to be entrenched in the paradoxical nature of (what I will refer to as) the societal condition, they approach it very differently. While the quartets makes deft use of symbolism and allusion, “The Wasteland” is essentially those two elements.

One could argue that “The Wasteland” endorses the second object of literature that Erskine espoused, and that “The four Quartets” endorse the first. Interestingly, “The Wasteland” seems to be the more notable of the two. That is the poem for which Elliot will be remembered, despite it not being as novel as the quartets. This is because, “The Wasteland” submits to the irreplaceability of the past, and it does so thoroughly that it simultaneously and paradoxically embodies the past and the (then) present. It is at once completely unoriginal and completely novel. In this work his is capable of being understood best by the western world. While on face “The Wasteland” is garbled, unfamiliar, confusing and foreign, it comes to be understood better and more clearly by a wide audience (with access to good footnotes) and its message is received and related to. That, is why it’s genius.