Comparing The Waste Land and surrealist painting : a methodological investigation

Abstract

The basic concern of this dissertation has been to establish a methodological approach that could accommodate analogous readings of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Surrealist painting. The aim was therefore to transform intuitively apprehended similarities between these texts into more sustained and scholarly arguments. In order to do so, a number of critical texts dealing with analogous readings of The Waste Land and Modern art movements were investigated with a view to extracting and evaluating the issues emerging from such an endeavour. It was found that Surrealism and Cubism were often used . for purposes of being read analogously with the poem, but the dissertation argues that the thematic complexity and concern for content which are salient to Surrealist painting render this particular movement in visual art more suitable for analogy with The Waste Land than Cubism. The concurrent reading of the poem and a painterly movement further necessitated an investigation into the probability of pursuing an interdisciplinary study of this nature, and a critical perspective of a number of existing views in this regard was undertaken. It was found that although the analogous reading of poetry and art is a contentious issue, it would be possible to compare two generically different kind of texts. Also, the texts under discussion - The Waste Land and Surrealist paintings- were framed within the Mode mist movement and particularly the branch of Modernism that questioned the optimistic and technological worldview so often associated with the Modernist project. Hence it was found that both The Waste Land and Surrealist painting undermine questions of certainty, clarity and objectivity by surrendering formal logic and embracing the darker, more ambivalent and doubtful branch of Modernism. In order to establish a workable methodological approach, semiotics emerged as being an eminently suitable tool for this purpose. Although semiotics has for a fairly long time been incorporated into literary studies, it has not yet been firmly established as an art-historical approach and therefore a number of critical perspectives on semiotics and the discipline of art history had to be investigated and assessed. Having established that the very interdisciplinary and also trans disciplinary nature of semiotics rendered this approach suitable for cross disciplinary investigation, the dissertation set out to establish a methodological approach based on semiotics and modified to suit the current purposes. The semiotic model of Riffaterre in Semiotics of poetry (1983) as supplemented by the conceptual framework of Johnson (1985) in an article entitled "Broken images - Discursive fragmentation and paradigmatic integrity in the poetry of T.S. Eliot" was proposed as an approach that would give the reader and viewer of The Waste Land and Surrealist painting access to a number of decoding possibilities and interpretative avenues. This model was supplemented by incorporating salient aspects such as fragmentation, allusion and intetiextuality as well as collage as part of the methodological approach. The final section of the dissertation set out to illustrate possible applications of the proposed methodological approach and here the notions of unfixed and indeterminate identity as well as the theme of sexual decay were addressed in exemplary analyses. It was established that the method can facilitate analogous interpretations of The Waste Land and Surrealist painting in a more structured and informed manner than the merely intuitive.