Calvin Bedient

A surprisingly good book about The Waste Land- although in desperate need of an editor. I recommend, if you're interested in the poem, that you get this book at the library, and photocopy every paragraph which contains not the names Bakhtin, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Freud or Lacan; nor any of the concepts used by those men and women. Because outside the faintly ridiculous Theory shadows, Bedient has given us a somewhat speculative, clear reading. His main claims are:

i) There is a single voice throughout the poem, which is engaged in a kind of pilgrimage.
ii) That pilgrimage leads beyond the messiness of the everyday to something which is unspecified, but which Bedient names the All, or silence.
iii) That this is a purely personal conversion, and is in a sense borderline nihilistic.

It's all a bit too neat to work completely, but it beats the pants off critics who use the same names and concepts to say that The Waste Land is really about glorying in sex and the promiscuity of language etc etc...… (meer)