Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

The semiotic approach to literature is presented with its greatest test by Shakespeare’s plays. Semiotics as a study of signs and codes of communication undergoes by far its toughest challenge when it has to deal with performance texts in the theatre. A signifier in semiotics needs both a speaker and a hearer. A phrase spoken by an actor to an audience intimately familiar with the actor, his text, his author and the shared culture of the day is a contribution to a hugely complex interchange of signs and signifiers.

The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw comedy shaken by the ears. The prolific Dion Boucicault, triumphant in 1841, supreme by 1874, could no longer find a theatrical buyer for his comedy Ourselves after 1887. The old formula had lost its authority. Meanwhile, Ibsen was crowning his already substantial achievements, Wilde would soon preach, through lucid inversion, the importance of not being earnest, Chekhov be given a second chance by the founding of the Moscow Art Theatre, Shaw would begin his sabotaging of the British theatre with The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891) and some ‘unpleasant’ plays of his own, and in Paris, on 10 December 1896, Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi would scandalize a theatrical public that was going to have to learn fast. The need for a reassessment of comedy was met, at the very outset of the new century, by the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson’s particular subject was laughter—the title of his 1900 monograph is Le Rire—but he explored his theme largely through the work of Molière and later French playwrights.

From this it is a short step to making Tiresias the wise truth-teller of the horrors of twentieth-century life, so that the poem he utters is granted its status because, in the words of Cleanth Brooks, ‘the fact that men have lost the knowledge of good and evil, keeps them from being alive, and is the justification for viewing the modern waste land as a realm in which the inhabitants do not even exist’ (1965, p. 138). Other critics might not press the claim with Brooks’s bland confidence, but with some notable exceptions The Waste Land was commonly agreed to be a great, diagnostic poem about the post-war world. This is why Eliot’s use of echo, quotation and allusion have been so often granted an unchallengeable authority.

Yet there can be no doubt that Pound’s editorializing not only improved the poem, it gave it a focus which had previously been lacking. At Pound’s suggestion, Eliot cut passages, altered others, and in a sense re-jigged the entire poem. The title he had proposed for his piece of rhythmical grumbling had been ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices’, a remark taken from Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, where it is spoken by an old woman about the brain-damaged youth she lovingly looks after. For Eliot to want to use the remark draws attention to his poem’s ventriloquism, its kaleidoscopic arrangement of voices. But it also, more troublingly, hints at mental problems in the person who ‘does’ the voices. Eliot suffered a nervous breakdown and had spent some time recuperating at Margate (‘On Margate sands./I can connect/Nothing with nothing’). The poem had originally opened with a long, semi-drunken monologue, in which a man talks of a succession of late-night gate-crashing parties, at clubs, houses. In its suggestion of febrile, joyless hedonism this rather remarkably anticipates the 1920s diaries of Evelyn Waugh. It also serves to locate the poem in terms of hysterical or viciously self-destructive behaviour, which may then turn it towards self-reflexivity, so that we may with reason anticipate that the real subject of the poem is the narrator with which it begins. By cancelling this passage, so that the poem as we have it now begins with the famous ‘April is the cruellest month’, Pound sees to it that The Waste Land feels to be more objectively about post-war society.

It is therefore of the utmost importance that we understand how Pound’s editorializing helped to shape The Waste Land as a distinctively modern poem.

Thanks to the Facsimile and Transcript edition of Eliot’s poem, which Valerie Eliot edited and published in 1971, we can now see that the version of The Waste Land published in 1922 is in many ways different from the poem Eliot intended. Or—since it is not quite clear what he did intend—we can say that the scraps and fragments he gave to Pound were turned by his friend, ‘Il miglior fabbro’, into one of the major texts of modernism.
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Yet there can be no doubt that Pound’s editorializing not only improved the poem, it gave it a focus which had previously been lacking. At Pound’s suggestion, Eliot cut passages, altered others, and in a sense re-jigged the entire poem.

The place where disaffection most clearly showed itself, and where the divergences between writers most powerfully emerged, was the city. The city was to modernism what the Copernican revolution had been to the Renaissance: it changed everything. Space, time, language, human relationships and personal identity—they were all profoundly altered by the experience of the city. As Raymond Williams has argued in his seminal essay ‘The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism’, the metropolis was where new social and economic cultural relations, beyond both city and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed (Williams, 1985, p. 20).

Hence, too, the accepted split between the popular and the good. This split was eloquently traced by Henry James, in an essay on ‘The Art of Fiction’ ([1884] 1957). Disputing what he saw to be a growing orthodoxy, one which took for granted that fiction ‘should either be instructive or amusing’, James insisted that the writer’s ultimate responsibility must be to his art and not to its consumers. His impassioned, resourceful defence of the right of the novelist to consider only the needs of his work became one of the central dogmas of modern poets, especially Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.