ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -And Eliot points out that the ‘mythical method’ which Joyce employs is important to his artistic technique: that is, using Homer’s Odyssey as a ‘parallel’ for the events of his modern-day Dublin novel.

Detailed explanation-2: -He explained that the mythical method consisted of creating “a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity”. “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the intense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (177).

Detailed explanation-3: -The mythic method does not offer an escape to a better past, but an entry to a confusing present. This method highlighted the reader’s participation, by diminishing the authoritative voice of the poet. The voices of the past mingle with fragments of modern life that the reader must then interpret and order.

Detailed explanation-4: -Other writers must follow this method, he argues. For Eliot, myth provides the writer with a stable frame through which to view and analyse the modern world. It is ‘a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’.