The Way Of Salvation:a Study Of Traumatic Motif In The Poetry Of T. S. Eliot

1948Nobel Prize winner T. S. Eliot created a new style of poetry. His influence on his time led critics to begin using the phrase "Eliot Epoch" in his honor. In expressing himself, he interprets his time. His The Waste Land may be the best known to readers. In this groundbreaking long poem, the poet portrays a wasteland as the background for mankind. All living things in the waste land are living in death, with desire splashing hither and thither. Modernist literature chances to be born in a time when revolutions and trauma ravages the planet, giving birth to a modern society in decline and chaos. The emergence of the "waste land" is primarily the result of the force of the trauma. While this waste land of Eliot’s may not be identified with any historic moment, it helps to put human history in perspective, the element of universality and eternity integrated.As a complicated mental disease and cultural phenomenon, human history is filled with traumatic experiences, which can be found in both Greek tragedies and modern pessimistic philosophy. Human beings live every minute in fear of trauma caused by natural and man-made disasters. The etymological meaning of "trauma" dates from ancient Greek times:a wound on the body. As modern psychologists have endowed it with more cultural connotation, trauma has released its cultural meaning. Two world wars have made it possible for more people to get a better insight into it. Trauma theory has been applied to cultural theory and literary research by the elucidating work of Dominick LaCapra, Cathy Caruth and others in the1990s. As a new knowledge discourse and research paradigm, the territory of trauma has been expanded dramatically. According to trauma theory, not traumatic event itself, but the subsequent reaction has a greater impact on the individual. The experience is not fully assimilated as it occurs, so the trauma returns to haunt the survivor later on, and only by the belated impact can it be fully grasped. The survivor tends to deny the trauma, burying the traumatic experience deep within the subconscious, but this only serves to make the impact more profound. Only through confronting the trauma, inspecting the memory and sublimating the cognition, can the survivor attain his salvation.The dissertation explores traumatic narratives in T. S. Eliot’s works with trauma theory, aiming to analyze what makes the "waste land" and the way of salvation. The body mainly deals with Eliot’s poetry, with his essays and scholarly criticism under consideration. The dissertation consists of six parts as follows:The first part is an introduction to the origin of this selected topic and some definitions in the dissertation, like trauma. The author also lists a literature review on T. S. Eliot and trauma.Chapter one clarifies two categories of trauma in the works of T. S. Eliot: individual trauma and collective trauma. The former includes the trauma of life, the trauma of body, and the latter includes men’s trauma and intellectuals’trauma. Influenced by modern pessimistic philosophy, modernist literature interprets life as a synonym for suffering. Human beings find it impossible to comprehend the world, and life becomes meaningless. Many characters in the works of T. S. Eliot live lives in death. The original meaning of trauma is a bodily wound, and such trauma is scattered throughout Eliot’s works. A series of violent acts inflicted on body stirs compassion, and the trauma of castration echoes the "waste" motif assembled in the poetry. The body trauma also reflects the poet’s puritan background, in which sex is considered disgusting. Hostility towards women comes in the form of making them appear ugly, with Nietzsche being the most extreme case. Eliot holds a complex and contradictory attitude towards women, from horror, detestation to attraction and understanding, which is closely linked with his background. Intellectuals take an elitist stance against the emergence of mass culture by obscuring their writing style and emphasizing tradition. These traumatic narratives finally give birth to a modern "waste land" Chapter two explores the ways Eliot and his characters deny their trauma. The author starts from analyzing Eliot’s works, based on LaCapra’s trauma theory, concludes that Eliot and his characters deny the trauma in three ways:The first is through the text. In the text, Eliot relies on tradition, in which classics are quoted, and the traumatized are projected onto a titanic intertextual space, in which the trauma partly dissolves. The second is through skills. With writing skills like objective correlative, impersonality and the dissociation of sensibility, Eliot effectively transfigures and alleviates the impact of the trauma. The third is through characters. The characters in the poetry also defend themselves against the trauma using the strategy of irony or fantasy, reflecting the poet himself.Chapter three explores the acting-out of the trauma. The traumatic experience is a profoundly paradoxical experience. The unexpected nature of trauma makes the traumatized know little about it, only to resurface after a period of time. Acting out the trauma is the key to recovery. In the works of Eliot, the poet acts it out in three ways, namely western philosophy, mysticism and oriental religion.Chapter-four mainly focus-on the salvation of the poet. Three ways are listed, namely, venting one’s feelings, inspecting one’s memory and moving towards salvation. Autobiography provides a "talk cure" for the traumatized as an outlet. The belatedness of traumatic events makes memory difficult to obtain, but only through memory can the traumatized approach the truth. Eliot finally attains salvation in Christianity.The last part is the conclusion of the dissertation:the waste land and the way of salvation are related to different traumatic experiences. While trauma becomes a part of human life, its existence gives us occasion to discuss the ultimate meaning of life.