Disciplining 'The Waste Land', or how to lead critics into temptation

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 1998 by Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

That the notes provide the means for unifying the poem does not, however, explain why they have had the power to do so. Many poets have annotated their texts - one thinks readily, to give just a few examples, of Spenser's "Shepheard's Calendar," Pope's "Dunciad Variorum," Byron's "Childe Harold," and more recently of James Merrill's "Yanina" - yet few such annotations have governed critical textual response in the way Eliot's notes have governed The Waste Land. Unlike Middleton, who suggests that all "footnotes are an institutional extension of the filing system for useful retrieval and recording of the institution's decisions" (175) and thus dictate how the text they annotate should be read, I believe that the discourses in which paratexts like the notes to The Waste Land participate must be understood within their own specific - and conflicted - historical contexts. Eliot's notes have served institutional purposes, but not because they simply "record institution's decisions." Indeed, if the notes did stand in for "the academy," then poststructuralist literary critics who have questioned the notes (including myself) would have to be understood as writing from a standpoint somehow outside of that same academy, a position I find untenable. Readings of the notes have changed, not because poststructuralists have somehow managed to free themselves from institutional constraints but because the notes represent a particular conflict in the professional literary critical discourse of the 1920s which no longer governs professional literary critical discourse today.

Today, professional literary criticism is practically synonymous with academic criticism, the few exceptions proving the rule. In the 20s, however, the term "professional literary critic" could include both academic critics and men of letters like Edmund Wilson, who had little use for universities or organizations like the MLA but who still made his living from his expertise in literary criticism. Throughout the first half of this century, both academic and nonacademic literary critics alike were grappling with the crisis of modernity while simultaneously attempting to establish literary study as a professional field.(6) In doing so, they faced a peculiarly difficult problem. Modern culture was in crisis precisely because the rational, ordered universe it both produced and depended on had begun to unravel under the signature of such influential authors as Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein. Yet, the literary critic's claim to professional status in the 20s was based on that critic's ability to provide a systematic method for ordering the literary text.(7) If the crisis of modernity had put the very possibility of ordering any text into question, what could distinguish the literary critic as a professional? Professional literary critics thus needed to find a way to resolve, or at least evade, the crisis of modernity in order to establish their own credentials.

Eliot's notes, by representing his poem as a unified and orderly whole, already performed the very maneuver professional literary critics sought to enact by shifting the central issues of the poem from questions of modernity to questions of interpretation. For although the poem radically questions the possibility of order, and thus the foundations of modernity, the notes assume that order not only can be achieved but already exists. While at least one speaker of the poem knows only "a heap of broken images," the author of the notes knows that the poem has a "purpose" and a "plan." The notes thus fundamentally change the reader's orientation to the poem. Like Wilson, readers who at first reading of the poem are confronted with a deconstruction of the very idea of order (a cry de profundis) find in the notes that the problem is not metaphysical after all but hermeneutic. The reader is asked to shift focus from considering the very possibility that order, as a concept, has failed, to considering how this poem is - or can be - ordered. In effect, when faced with the poem's "difficulties," the reader is told to become a better reader rather than to investigate the foundational source for his or her readerly discomfort.