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

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

Not only does this method suggest a means of unifying the poem, it does so by using a language peculiar to early twentieth-century professional literary criticism. As I stated above, I do not mean that notes are or have become a distinctly academic form. Rather, the Tarot note in particular, and the notes to The Waste Land in general, encode a conflict then raging in professional literary criticism between philology and impressionism. Impressionism was based on Pater's claim that art can only be experienced subjectively, and on Arnold's belief in literature as the prime conveyor of a culture's spiritual values. In practice, impressionistic critics would offer their personal responses to works of art, believing that their refined sensibilities as members of an Arnoldian remnant would reveal the spiritual truths of the work before them. As literary studies became increasingly professionalized and localized in universities, however, impressionism was gradually supplanted by philology and its related forms of scholarship.(9) Originally based in linguistics, philology was developed in German universities as a scientific method using literary texts to study the history of language. Gradually, however, literary scholars, following the French critic Hippolyte Taine, became more interested in the historical background of the text than in the language in which the text was written. American philology essentially combined German philological methods with Taine's historical interest to develop a scientific study of literary sources.

Eliot's note on the Tarot deck is premised on the reader's ability to reconcile the author's personal impressions with the more "objective" citation style he uses, to reconcile, that is, the impressionistic and philological methods. Like many of the scholarly academic notes with which we are still familiar today, the Tarot note instructs the reader to examine other sources - namely, Frazer's The Golden Bough and the New Testament - in order to comprehend the full meaning of individual Tarot cards. At the same time, however, Eliot admits that he "is not familiar with the exact constitution of the Tarot pack," that he has "departed from the pack to suit [his] own convenience," and that some of his referential associations are made "arbitrarily," such as his claim that "The Man with Three Staves" is the "Fisher King." Two very different constructions of textual understanding are at play here, one based on the philologist's scientific use of annotation and citation to record evidence for textual arguments, the other based on the impressionist's intuition of the author's motives and desires to enhance the reader's pleasure in reading. Neither method, on its own, is apparently sufficient to "elucidate" the poem.

In fact, as represented in the notes, both philological and impressionistic inquiry can come to seem rather comical. Ever since the poem was published in book form, many commentators have noticed that the notes have a distinctly parodic quality.(10) In 1923, for example, one of Eliot's antagonism at Cambridge, the Renaissance scholar F. L. Lucas, attacked the notes in his review of the poem as being "as muddled as they are incomplete":