ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a poststructural, psychoanalytic reading of The Waste Land which argues against trying to fill the gaps and ambiguities of the poem with hidden meaning or order. A ceremonial purgation, it inventories all the ‘stony rubbish’ that it strives to exercise. The line ‘April is the cruellest month’ blasphemes against the first lines of The Canterbury Tales, which presented April’s showers as so sweet. At once a nod to origins and a flagrant declaration of beginninglessness, this allusion grafts the poem to another text, vaunting its parasitic inbetweenness. Her profession parodies the poet’s, demoted as he is to the typist or amanuensis of the dead. In The Waste Land as in Ovid, writing provides the only refuge from aphasia, but it is a weapon that turns against its own possessor. In ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ Eliot celebrates the voices of the dead, but he comes to dread their verbal ambush in The Waste Land.
