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

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

The note to Tiresias provides a capsule example of this discursive shift. Tiresias, Eliot tells us in this famous note, "although a mere spectator and not indeed a 'character,' is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest." We can see how this sentence redirects the reader from questions of order to questions of reading. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the poem is its multiplicity of voices, a cacophony that refuses to follow any singular narrative line. Some of that trouble is reflected in this sentence, as the author searches for a descriptive term for the voice Tiresias names. Is he a spectator, a character, or a personage? If a spectator, what is the spectacle? If a character, in what play? These questions of narrative order are raised, however, only to be deflected by the central claim that, whatever Tiresias may be called, he unites all the rest. The question we are led to ask is no longer whether the characters in the poem are organized in any meaningful way, but how they are organized. How does Tiresias unite all the "personages" of the poem? More to the point, how did we miss his unifying role? Are there perhaps other unifying features we missed? The hermeneutic circle thus begun, the project of modernity is allowed to continue.

The note to the Tarot deck provides an even clearer example, not only of how this shift from a crisis of order to a crisis of reading occurs in the notes but also of why pursuing this interpretive move was so attractive to previous generations of professional literary critics. The Tarot cards enter the poem through the figure of Madame Sosostris, a fortune-teller whose name links her to the transvestite character in Aldous Huxley's Chrome Yellow. By the usual literary conventions, Sosostris appears to be an unreliable, even comic, speaker in the poem; a clairvoyant whose vision is clouded by her "bad cold," she stands as another lost figure in the "unreal city." Her attempt to tell the future, an endeavor that assumes that the future is fixed and thus knowable, parodies the modern quest to find predictable order. In this quest, Sosostris fails. She cannot see far enough into the future to protect the horoscope she brings to "Mrs. Equitone," nor can she even see the meaning of all of her cards. She can "not find" the Hanged Man, and she advises her client to "Fear death by water," even though the waste land is plagued by drought, and the speaker of the poem's climactic fifth section waits for rain. Sosostris's advice is not necessarily bad; Phlebas the Phoenician does experience a possibly unhappy "death by water" in section IV. That, however, is precisely the point. Sosostris is wrong not in warning her client to fear water, but in masking the complicated, ambivalent role water plays in the waste land. What her comic advice underscores is the impossibility of formulating a coherent plan of action predicated on an ordered world.

Rather than focusing on the larger questions Sosostris's horoscope raises, however, this note, like the note on Tiresias, deflects our attention by suggesting that an ordered reading of the cards is, indeed, possible. Where a reader uneducated by the notes might ask whether formulating any "horoscope" is feasible in an uncertain world, the reader who follows the notes is instructed to overcome the comic disorder of Sosostris's predictions in order to find the "real" order they conceal. The note to the Tarot card implies that telling the future is possible, and advises us that Sosostris's horoscope accurately foreshadows the order of the poem, if only we know how to read it. We are told to look for the one-eyed merchant, the Phoenician Sailor and "Death by Water" later in the poem, where they appear, respectively, in part III as "Mr. Eugenides," and in part IV as "Phlebas the Phoenician" whose "Death by Water" is recounted. Despite Sosostris's own inability to find him, "The Hanged Man" is associated with the "Hanged God of Frazer," and thus with both the risen Christ the disciples see on their way to Emmaus (in part V) and with the grail quest (via the spiritual death of the King and his land's rebirth anticipated in that myth). The effect of the note is to demonstrate a method of reading that distinguishes between significant and insignificant references on the assumption that the seemingly heterogeneous images of the poem are unified by a few important themes.(8) This "elucidative method," as Eliot calls it in his headnote, orders the poem.