엘리엇, 엔트로피, 그리고 쓰레기: 『황무지』와『네 사중주』의 생태학적 읽기

Abstract

Since the publication of The Waste Land in 1922, the poem has become the center of controversy. One of the reasons why it has enjoyed such a variety of diverse critical opinions is that it is hard to definitely find the message(s) in it. When the new criticism ruled the day, it was the new critics favorite poem to show how new criticism worked. No amount of critical endeavor, however, can exhaust the rich significance of the poem. When the so-called postmodernism came along, the poem has once again become a favorite target to show how postmodernist the poem is. The poem can have a re-birth as an ecological poem in the 21st century. What I am going to show in this essay is how much ecologically-concered the poem is. This can be shown by looking at the title, The Waste Land, itself. Waste in this case can mean garbage that the technologically-developed world has to produce. As technology develops, the energy available can become unusable, proliferating high degree of entropy, a term for useless energy. In this respect, the poem is a litany of negative catalogue of waste. We can naturally ask whether there is any way out of the present mess of waste we see around us. The answer to this question can be found in Four Quartets. Uselsss energy can turn into useful one if we find a way to recycle it. What the Quartets shows us is exactly the way how we could go about this business. What we could do to reverse the vicious circle is to turn the linear progression of time into a cyclical time. This is exactly what happens in the Quartets. By saying that in my beginning is my end, Eliot shows that the time in the Quartets is a cyclical one. The cyclical time is that of the mythology and paradise. In this poem Eliot shows how we can restore harmony in our lives by turning the linear progression of time into a cyclical one.