Theme Of Intertextuality In The Waste Land

Intertextuality in The Waste Land incarnates the problem of fragmentation

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is the most famous and influential poem in the literary Modernism. The Waste Land contains complex imagery and multiple voices which increase the complication for readers as prior knowledge of the intertextuality reference is needed. Although with the already-known of the literary references, the comprehension of the poem heavily relies on the reader’s understanding of those allusions. Intertextuality receives a lot of critics on the debts and legacies of previous work, which destroy uniqueness and creativity in writing. This essay with the literary review tries to define intertextuality and to show how T.S. Eliot uses different kinds of intertextuality

The relationship between the reader and the text is called the horizontal axis while the complex set of relations of the text to other texts is the vertical axis. Kristeva thinks that the significance of the view of a text’s structure is coordinated by the ‘structuration’, that is “the pattern of interconnected fields within which meaning is transmitted to the reader through already-known vocabularies of generic and discursive formation.” (Childs, Fowler, 2006) It is the author’s role to control the particular intertextual references and the readers’ job to decode the meanings derived from the references and the importance of it. Since not every reader is familiar with all the references the poet used and the poem depend on the reader’s preceding knowledge of the interests, this makes the poem challenging to read and there will be many variations of reader’s interpretation. The technique of intertextuality contains quotation, allusion, claque, translation, parody, pastiche and plagiarism to create the vertical axis and add layers to the poem. Eliot used a number of narrative voices differentiated by the variety of dictions found in the poem

Intertextual echo is the “divided references into quotations, allusions and echoes.” (Moyise, 2002) In other words, intertextual echo usually appears in a form of allusion or quotations to evoke readers on the themes and central messages of the poem. The most noticeable intertextual echo is the thorny entrance of a Latin and Greek epigraph that Eliot presents in The Waste Land with. “I have seen with my own eyes the Sibyl hanging in a jar, and when the boy asked her ‘What do you want?’ She answered ‘I want to die” (Eliot, 2005)

The epigraph is extracted from the Satyricon of Petronius alludes the Cumaean Sibyl story. The Cumaean Sibyl granted a wish by Apollo and she asked for immortality. Wishes are tricky, the Cumaean Sibyl failed to ask for the perpetual youth together with the immortality when making her wish. Her immortality becomes an endless process of enervation and waiting for unattainable death. In Eliot’s poem, the epigraph has an unquestionable important role that affects the poem in every way. The epigraph is interlocking with the poem and can be seen as devices performing a parallel function that follows a highly similar logic in the poem. Sibyl’s condition of the living dead is echoing with the condition of The Wasted Land dying civilization. Eliot extracted this quotation to prime the reader the catastrophe in the wasted land