The concept of bricolage through reading The Waste Land

This article tackles the concept of bricolage to read Eliot’s celebrated poem The Waste Land. Gérard Genette argues in “Structuralisme et Critique littéraire” how Lévi-Strauss’ notion of bricoleur is applicable to criticism. Derrida, in “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” deconstructs Lévi-Strauss’ difference between the engineer and bricoleur. I take the argument to writing in an attempt to demonstrate how Eliot in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and The Waste Land comes close to the definition of the writer as a bricoleur. He uses everything at hand, any material whether from tradition or from his personal life as “a raid on the inarticulate” (Complete Poems 128). Eliot’s notion of originality, to paraphrase him, is a way of making something new out of the most heterogeneous material and experience. What matters to Eliot is the process and the way in which the “material is digested and transformed by the poetic genius.