ABSTRACT
Steve Ellis has recently offered a thoughtful analysis based on Iser's ideas, concluding that there is a tug in The Waste Land between Eliot's 'undoubted sympathy with the subjectivism of readerly response' and his need 'for some kind of control'. Eliot's view of language, argue Brooker and Bentley, has much in common with that of Levi-Strauss and Derrida: like them he saw every text as bricolage — work with tools known to be 'always already' fallen into imprecision. The fact that over the course of his career Eliot wrote a number of essays about the French Symbolist poet Paul Valery testifies to the importance which the Symbolist aesthetic held for him. Eliot's prose writings thus betray a solipsism that would free itself from the feeling subject; and the same strain can be felt in The Waste Land. One of Eliot's sources of allusion, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, is particularly noteworthy because it signals the manner of The Waste Land.
