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Issue 4: January - June 2005

Conchitina Cruz

T.S. Eliot's Notorious Notes and the Figure of the Reader in "TheWasteland"

Among the multitude of speakers that populate T.S. Eliots The Waste Land, there is one

voice that asserts itself repeatedly and thus gains prominence: the voice of the poet himself,

as embodied by the Notes section attached to the poem. The utterancesof the imagined

speakersMarie, the hyacinth girl, Madame Sosostris, the affluent woman, the gossipingwoman at the pub, Tiresias, the nightingale, the thunder, the various, anonymous Isare

confined to single sections and are therefore not as numerous. The reading practice imposedupon the reader by what Michael North describes as Eliots notorious notes allows the

distinct voice of the poet to permeate all of the poems five sections. Attached to the end ofthe poem, the notes cannot be read on their own and become meaningful only when read in

tandem with the poem itself; consequently, the reader who chooses to incorporate them into

her reading must keep track of every line that has a note attached to it, shift constantly fromthe main text to the corresponding note, and deduce the significance of the additional

information within the context of a given line. This reading practice permits Eliot to

smuggle what he believes to be crucial supplementary knowledge into The Waste Land as

the reader reads it. The notes emerge as a recurring, explicit, direct address of poet toreader.

C.K. Stead asserts that the inclusion of the notes was prompted by the difficult process of thepoems composition (123-24) as well as Eliots own uncertainty over its innovations. In the course

of writing The Waste Land, there was no clear plan, no sin gle model, only the feeling(encouraged by Pound) that one could spread beyond the confines of the well-made poem, theclosed form, the defined structure, and in doing so get new life into poetry, reflecting the new age(86). The notes, she suggests, became a means for Eliot to convince his readers of what he wasunconvinced himself, that it really was one poem, complete and coherent it was in these notes

that he invited his readers to discover in Jessie Westons book not only the title, but the plan and agood deal of the incidental symbolism of the poem (124). Decades later, Eliot himself wouldremark that the notes have had almost greater popularity than the poem itself (North 113). Jo Ellen

Green Kaiser observes that from Edmund Wilson and Cleanth Brooks to Calvin Bedient in 1986,critics have depended on the notes as a means to read the poem and establish its unity, even whensuch a use conflicted with their own theoretical methodology. Cleanth Brooks, for example, knownfor his description of poems as autonomous, organic wholes, admits in his essay on The Waste

Land that he finds himself unable to resist[italics mine] using Eliots notes to construct what heacknowledges to be a scaffolding of understanding around the poem. Although he realizes that hemay rely too much on Eliots note[s], he finds it impossible to understand the poem without them.(2)

What Stead so kindly refers to as Eliots invitation amounts to a total of 50 endnotes
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(accompanied by a brief introduction to the Notes section as well as another introduction

to the notes to Part V). In a poem of over 430 lines, Eliot interrupts the reader at roughly

every ninth line. It is difficult enough to immerse oneself in the already fragmented world ofThe Waste Land, given the juxtaposition of multiple voices, languages, locations, and

situations. The Notes section heightens the characteristically modernist disorientation of

the reader who literally enacts the violent yoking of poetic and academic discourse,turning pages back and forth in order to juxtapose the utterances of various speakers with

Eliots pedantic inventory of allusions and blatant interpretations of his own work. Through

his notes, Eliot acquires omniscience, escaping the silence to which poets are often assigned

once their poems are finished and circulated via publication. His invitation is not friendly;it is persistent, intrusive, relentless. The notes, through their mere presence and sheer

volume, lend the poem the appearance of an academic document and exaggerate what Eliot

himself calls the difficulties of the poem. It is understandable then, that like Brooks,

readers and critics are unable to resist them.

Implicit in the attempt and consequent failure to resist the notes, it seems, is the readers

discomfort over the way she is positioned as a participant in reading the poem. The notesseem to threaten the readers integrity and power; to rely on the notes is to forego ones

independence in navigating a text and to install the author as an indispensable presence in a

poems interpretation.Certainly, in a poem populated by many voices, Eliots note to line218 offers relief when it declares that Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a

character, is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest all the

women [in the poem] are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresiassees, in fact, is the substance of the poem. The note conveniently provides us with a plan

with which to approach the poems many speakers; however, it also prevents readers from

arriving at the same or other conclusions on their own. It is as if Eliot rule[s] out

emotional accidents by supplying his readers, in notes, with only those associations which

are correct (Aiken 151). It is through the notes that Eliot enumerates the three themes ofthe first part of What the Thunder Said and it is through the notes that he informs the

reader of the personal associations he makes with certain members of the Tarot included inthe poem.

Furthermore, when Eliot is not tyrannical in his interpretation of the poem, he is cryptic.Michael North says some of these notes, including the one accounting for the dead sound

of the bell of Saint Mary Woolnoth, are so blandly pointless as to suggest a hoax, and

others, particularly those citing classical quotations in the original languages, seemdetermined to establish mysteries rather than dispel them (ix). The only time Eliot uses the

notes to translate is when he quotes from the Upanishads and translates the Sanskrit into

English in the notes to lines 401 and 403. The notes specify allusions only to withhold thereaders access to such sources by citing them in their original and least accessible form,once again emphasizing the readers ignorance and powerlessness as well as sustaining the

notion of the author as the site of privileged and exclusive knowledge. Unable to fulfill the

purpose of illumination, the notes become the equivalent of clutter, of junkuseless to thereader and therefore disposable.

While it seems evident that there are ways in which Eliots flawed, heavy-handed notes


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render the reader powerless, the notes may, on the other hand, operate as a source of power

once considered in relation to the figure of the reader as imagined in The Waste Land

itself. The direct address to the reader may be most explicit in the Notes section, yet thereis one moment in the actual poem where the reader is addressed, thus converting both poet

and reader into characters in the poem. This moment complicates the position of the reader

in relation to the text by figuring her as both outsider and insider, both a consciousness thatexists outside the world of the poem and a character inside it. Once the reader assumes this

dual rolethat the poem calls for, the notes are transformed from an extraneous to an integral

supplement. Gerard Genette, in discussing the authorial note, suggests that it makes possible

a second level of discourse, one that sometimes contributes to textual depth it bringsabout local effects of nuance, or sourdine, or as they also say in music, of register if the

note is a disorder of the text, it is a disorder that, like some others, may have its proper use

(328). Although they may be perceived as clutter by the reader who is unaware of the part

she is asked to play in the poem, the notes, by virtue of the allusions that they make visible,become not only useful but also crucial to the reader who is also a characterin The Waste

Land. Outside the context of this dual role, the notes seem oppressive to the reader, yet

their value in relation to the reader as a particular member of the waste land transforms thenotes into a complicated, unusual form of power.

In Part I, the last stanza, which begins with a reference to an Unreal City, is graduallyrevealed to be an address to the reader, thereby positioning the unnamed speaker as the poet

himself:

There I saw one I knew and stopped him, crying, Stetson!You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!That corpse you planted last year in your garden,Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?Oh keep the Dog far hence, thats friend to men,Or with his nails hell dig it up again!

You! Hypocrite lecteur!mon semblable,mon frere![1] (lines 69-76)

The moment is not immediately noticeable: it is one among many fluctuating moments in

the poem and the address to the reader is in another language, making it doubly hard toaccess. Nevertheless, once recognized, the reader and the poet no longer hover above the

page and struggle with each other over authority in reading the poem in the battlefield of the

notes. Instead, they enter the imagined waste land that is the landscape of the poem and

become members of its cast of characters, with the reader as a fellow war veteran and

hypocrite lecteurin this resoundingly ironic and bitter address (Froula 276). As Stan Smithexplains, ostensibly fixed in a subject-position here, the reader is then at once dispossessed

as the narrative shifts, plunged into the same volatility as all the other personages in the

poem (132). In this passage, the hypocrite reader has no memory and is unable torecognize a comrade in war while the comrade is the poet himself, who reminds the reader

of who he is (You who were withme in the ships at Mylae!). In a desperate attempt to

spark recognition as Stetson, the reader, goes about his own business without any indicationof a response to his comrade, the poet calls out to the reader as my likeness, my brother.
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Christine Froula further complicates the readers forgetfulness by suggesting the preference

for amnesia that results in the inability to remember, recognize, and consequently,

memorialize. She describes this scene as a provocative adjuration [that] takes us to the verywellsprings of the poems emotion, the site of shared knowledge, only to mock us there.

Even as it alludes to common memories of corpses, war dead, lost companions, it savagely

parodies our collusion in repressing the truth about those memories; in denying death,feigning not to see what we see or know what we know. The scandal of the corpse buried in

your, that is, our gardena garden both ours and the poems, a fertile shared unconscious,

locus of unbearable, hence buried, knowledgeis less its death than the pretense that we

have not buried but euphemistically planted it (277)

If, in the imagined world of the poem, the reader thrives in amnesia, refusing to

acknowledge a comrade or bury a corpse, and if the poet, even as he calls out to the readerin a futile attempt at recognition, equally desires and ultimately succumbs to the affliction

of the reader himself, the horrible amnesia, then this is disconnection at its tragic, poignant

best. As characters, both reader and poet are veterans of war, yet they are perfect likenesses

in their isolation. They are each in his prison (line 413); their devastation is not sharedand has torn them apart, leaving them both alone in their grief.

In the barren, sterile world of The Waste Land, a poem that is also traditionally read as

an elegiac monument of a traumatized European sensibility in the aftermath of the First

World War (Froula 276), this moment aligns itself with many other moments in the poem,where despair, agitation, and suffering are experienced by those in the waste land inisolation. Despite the numerous speakers, no camaraderie exists in the poem; the speakers

do not interact. Although Madame Sosostris, the gossiping woman in the pub, and the poet

himself in the encounter with Stetson (the reader) speak within the context of aconversation, nobody responds to what they say, reducing their words to chatter. The only

speakers who explicitly address each other are the affluent woman and her partner in AGame of Chess (lines 111-138), yet their conversation displays utter disconnectionbetween them, emphasized by the womans desperate plea to her partner to Speak to me.

Why do you never speak? Speak./What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?/I

never know what you are thinking. Think. (lines 111-114). When the pronoun you

surfaces in the utterances of certain speakers, positioning readers as addressees, we areperfect Stetsons, not knowing or remembering what the hyacinth girl alludes to when she

says You gave me hyacinths first a yearago (line 35), not knowing or remembering who

we are in the context of the command O you who turn the wheel and look towindward,/Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you (lines 320-21). Even

the stories told by other speakers portray characters in a state of utter disconnection: the

gossiping woman at the pub talks about Lil and her recently demobbed husband, Albert, yetthe reunion of husband and wife is besieged by issues of ugliness, abortion, and potentialabandonment; Tiresias speaks of a passionless sexual encounter between a carbuncular

house agents clerk and a typist, where he assaults at once;/Exploring hands encounter no

defence;/His vanity requires no response,/And makes a welcome of indifference (lines239-42).

Amid a plethora of isolated speakers, addressees, and characters that populate the poem, it


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is only the reader-as-Stetson who has the potential to diminish her sense of isolation as she

inhabits the waste land. Without the notes, the reader-as-Stetson remains forever memory-

less, imprisoned in the state of un-recognition, and like the rest of the characters in thepoem, eternally alone; however, because the reader, while a character in the waste land, is

also the one who is holding the page and reading the poem, she escapes the condition to

which all other members of the poem are condemned and assumes a state of flux. From theconvergence of Stetson and the reader arises a dynamic character, one who is able to

emerge from her own, private isolation by entering, in brief periods of time, the Notes

section that is the poems paratext. Given her dual role, the notes prohibit the reader-as-

Stetson from remaining for too long in a waste land, providing a constant alternative to itsdesolate landscape.

Granted, what the notes offer is an alternative that is unfamiliar to the reader. The

Notes section may provide relief from a landscape where desperation makes one settle for

a pittance of comfort, reducing ones desire to have water to having, at the very least, its

soundIf there were rock/And also water/And water/A spring/A pool among the rock/Ifthere were the sound of water only (lines 348-52)yet it also provides mysteries,

utterances in foreign tongues, new names. The notes certainly do not permit the reader-as-Stetson to break free from the waste land, since what they contain is utterly dependent on

the world of the poem itself. What they offer is a palliative to the isolation the waste land

provokes tailored specifically to the only character in possession of a doubleconsciousness. Through confirming and illuminating allusion, a device directly addressed

to the reader, they reveal something about the character of the waste land that may be of

value to those who seem doomed to eternal isolation. But since the notes are ultimately

accessible only to the reader-as-Stetson, they turn her into the most powerful and privilegedcharacter in the poem.

As a literary device, allusion operates on the premise that a reader knowsand will thereforerecognize a reference when made. In discussing the characters in the poem, Smith

catalogues the knowledge that is unreliable, unavailable, or useless to them, explaining that

everywhere the concept of knowing is called in question. Madame Sosostris may beknown to be the wisest woman in Europe, but the text treats the claim with ironic disdain.

Stetson is one I knew. The woman in A Game of Chess claims I never know what you

are thinking. Albert will want to know what you done with that money he gave you; and

Lil will know who to thank should Albert desert her. The speaker in What the Thundersaid does not know whether a man or a woman. The reader is interpellated to an

ignorance like that of Oedipus who exclaims in Murrays 1911 translation, Oh, riddles

everywhere and words of doubt! (132-33)

What differentiates the reader-as-character from the rest of the population of The Waste

Land is a growing revision of her understanding of her predicament through the allusionthat becomes visible to her through the notes. Because of the knowledge the notes provide

and the subsequent fulfillment of allusion, the reader who is also a character is coaxed out

of her otherwise memory-less state and becomes privy to what is invisible to the rest ofthe cast: every isolated member in the poem isin possessionof a companion, a voice from


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isolation of the speaker, who remains, in the world of the poem, eternally unanswered. But

the use of the second person positions the reader, who leads a double life inside and outside

the poem, as its addressee, and implicit in the question is the belief that the other canprovide an answer. As Smith explains, by the time of What the Thunder Said it is the

reader/addressee who has become the subject-supposed-to-know Who is the third who

walks beside you? (132) From an outsider who seems ignorant and powerless in navigatingthe intimidating text of the poem to an insider, a character residing in the waste land who

assumes a dual role and acquires privileged knowledge through the notes, the reader

emerges as the most dynamic, intriguing participant in the poem. Though she remains silent

when asked about the hooded image, among the speakers, addressees, and characters ofThe Waste Land, it is certain that what the answer is, the reader has the power to know.

Works Cited

Aiken, Conrad. An Anatomy of Melancholy. North. 148-152.

Froula, Christine. Corpse, Monument,Hypocrite Lecteur: Text and Transference in the

Reception of The Waste Land. North. 275-85.

Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. North. 5-26.

Genette, Gerard.Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997.

Kaiser, Jo Ellen Green. Disciplining The Waste Land, or how to lead critics into

temptation. Twentieth Century Literature 44.1 (1998): 82-99. 31 August 2004

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0403/is_n1_v44/ai_20851475/pg_


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Longenbach, James. Mature poets steal: Eliots allusive practice. The Cambridge

Companion to T.S. Eliot. Ed. A. David Moody. Cambridge: Cambridge UP,

1994. 176-88.

North, Michael, ed. The waste land: authoritative text, contexts, criticism. New York:

Norton, 2001.

Smith, Stan. The Origins of Modernism: Eliot, Pound, Yeats and the Rhetorics of

Renewal. New York : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.

Stead, C.K.Pound, Yeats, Eliot and the Modernist Movement. London: Macmillan, 1986.

[1]North translates this as Hypocrite reader!my likeness,my brother!
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