Waste Land the Contrast Between

Waste Land

The contrast between T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" and Martin Rowson's comic version of "The Waste Land" is like the contrasting sources of light and power from the sun and the moon. The sun, Eliot's brilliant, iconic version, gives off a powerful beam, and illuminates the literary world with sunshine so bright and intense that it can actually burn images into the reader's consciousness. The moon, Rowson's version of "The Waste Land" has no original light of its own -- it is not the original source of light for "The Waste Land" -- but rather it reflects and refracts the illumination from Eliot's original. It does present unique power, adapting the concept of Eliot's work and turning it into something satirical and entirely different that orbits around the concept of noir thriller with a detective / private eye theme a parody of Raymond Chandler.

Eliot's The Waste Land vs. Rowson's The Waste Land

It is not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that Eliot's poem is among the most important poems in the 20th Century. In the poem Eliot -- who had enough prestige and talent to quote from other legendary writers -- uses quotes from William Shakespeare, Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, Joseph Conrad, John Milton, Hermann Hesse, Walt Whitman, Aldous Huxley, and Baudelaire, among others. He also incorporates several languages (perhaps to promote the universality of poetry and literature?), including German, French, ancient Sanskrit, Greek, Italian and Latin.

In addition to the sheer brilliance of the themes, ironies, conflicts and historical juxtapositions in Eliot's poem, what makes Eliot's work so unique and so far apart from other poems is the shifting that Eliot does between prophecy and satire, and suddenly the time frame shifts, the location switches, and the reader is easily caught off guard. You could say Eliot's poem is a kind of grab bag of different fragments, each of which has meaning within meaning, a story within a story. He doesn't really tell a story; he explores themes, with five different themes thoroughly hashed out in the five sections. Eliot wrote his poem at the end of World War I, and some of the pessimism in his symbolism is a reflection of that bloody mess.

In Rowson's version he mimics Eliot in the sense that his comic book is part satirical, it is pessimistic, and it is told in fragments, as well. But the two literary works could hardly be farther apart in substance, as Rowson parodies a crime novel's trashy tone -- parodying noted pulp crime writer Raymond Chandler more than Eliot or Eliot's poem -- and it shows in his edgy comic drawings that there is more than one "waste land" in the world.

Rowson had some problems in getting his lawyers to sign off on his parodies of Eliot's lines; for example, in Eliot's "The Fire Sermon," line 205, the poet writes "Jug jug jug jug…" and originally Rowson had his hero, Chris Marlowe ("Philip Marlowe" was a Chandler character ) walking past six jugs in the British Museum (which he uses in his comic illustrations). So instead of the six "jug[s]…" Rowson changed jugs to "Ampora," "vessel," "gugglet," "pitcher," "ewer," and "crock." And the difference between Eliot's poem where the poet used lines directly from the classics, Rowson made up names of Latin writers that were wholly fictitious.