What is it about?
A feature of the modernist work of art is its ability to produce a perceptual change in the reader regarding its subject. Eliot's The Waste Land is not simply a poem of post-World War I ‘drouth’, but a highly constructive contrasting of the faithless lives of a great range of people from all levels of society with the hope of a higher life held out by the Gospels. This contrast has been observed in the past by two outstanding critics who, however, lacked a methodology which would enable them to account for the signifying system of the poem as a whole. Michael Riffaterre has provided a semiotically grounded theory which—considerably expanded—may show how the whole text is based on two ‘matricial’ propositions, the first involving the many voices of a fallen society, and the second involving the compassionate concern of a divine protagonist. Each underlying proposition generates a large set of variant symbolic images on the textual surface, and the first proposition is syntagmatically linked to the second. The relation between this structure and an intertextual model gives rise to a third sign, their interpretant. The latter has a ‘sociolectic context’ of similar vocabulary but contrasting structure; it is this contrast which produces perceptual change in the reader.
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Why is it important?
The Waste Land is Eliot's masterpiece, and an icon of modernism in poetry. It has been enormously influential, as far afield as Japan, where a group of poets published a journal with the title "Arechi" – waste-land – In the 1940s. Despite excellent books on the poem, like that of Seamus Perry (2014), a semiotic methodology has apparently never been applied to it. The result has been that most readers misread the text, failing to see that two underlying propositions generate two sets of images throughout the text. This provides great tension between the faithless "voices" of society, and the saving power of the Christian message.
Perspectives
This article is the fruit of research since Hopkins 1994/95. Michael Riffaterre applied his theory to only 2 poems in English, one by Wordsworth (1803) and one by Auden (1938). He is never explicit that his theory applies above all to modern poetry. Unfortunately, it has never been applied to Eliot's masterpiece, until now.
Dr John A F Hopkins
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A Semiotic Key to The Waste Land, Chinese Semiotic Studies, January 2016, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/css-2016-0048.
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