Waste Land Essay: Eluding Understanding :: T.S. Eliot Waste Land Essays

The bollocks Land  Eluding Understanding     The Waste Land  is, to begin with, a poem that includes an interpretation as part of the poem, and it is therefore a poem that makes a problem of its meaning precisely by virtue of its app arnt (and apparently inadequate) effort to explain itself. We cannot understand the poem without knowing what it meant to its author, but we must also assume that what the poem meant to its author will not be its meaning. The notes to The Waste Land are, by the logic of Eliots philosophical critique of interpretation, simply another riddle--and not a separate one to be solved. They are, we might say, the poems way of treating itself as a reflex, a something not intended as a sign, a gesture whose full significance it is impossible, by virtue of the nature of gestures, for the gesturer to explain. And the structure of the poem--a textbook followed by an explanation--is a reproduction of a pattern that, as the notes themselves emphasize, is repeated in miniature many times inside the poem itself, where ethnic expressions are transformed, by the mechanics of allusion, into cultural gestures. For each time a literary phrase or a cultural motif is transposed into a impudent context--and the borrowed motifs in The Waste Land are shown to have themselves been borrowed by a succession of cultures--it is reinterpreted, its previous meaning becoming incorporated by distortion into a new meaning suitable to a new use. So that the work of Frazer and Weston is relevant both because it presents the history of religion as a series of appropriations and reinscriptions of cultural motifs, and because it is itself an unreliable reinterpretation of the phenomena it attempts to describe. The poem (as A. Walton Litz argued some time ago) is, in other words, not about spiritual dryness so much as it is about the ship canal in which spiritual dryness has been perceived. And the relation of the notes to the poem proper seems further emblematic of the relation of the work as a whole to the cultural custom it is a commentary on. The Waste Land is presented as a contemporary reading of the Western tradition, which (unlike the ideal order of Tradition and the Individual Talent) is hard-boiled as a sequence of gestures whose original meaning is unknown, but which every new text that is added to it makes a bad guess at.