Unconquered Peaks

It is true that when a reader approaches a text, their primary and most important tools of interpretation are the words on the page, an idea which lends itself well to the impression that the author is therefore irrelevant in the relationship between reader and text (Barthes, 1977); Roland Barthes’ Death of the Author argument is indeed a convincing one. To apply this principle to Modernist literature, however, is to undermine the form’s metatextual significance. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, for example, a hyper awareness of the author is part of what defines the artistic movement as distinct from its predecessors. The text works not just as a poem, but a commentary on poetry, vividly aware of the author’s role as the conductor of the piece. The Waste Land depends on Eliot’s presence—not as a singular storyteller but as an orchestrator of meaning; even in its fragmentation, the poem reinforces the author’s role as a curator of cultural memory. The Modernist literary movement seems deeply concerned with though suspicious of, the role of the author; in a time of social upheaval and moral uncertainty, writers purposefully fractured the established tools of artistic expression, finding them no longer suited to express unique modern concerns. Indeed, as Woolf argues, ‘For us, those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.’ (1924, p. 16) The Waste Land, acutely self-aware, rather than dissolving the author, ultimately reaffirms his presence as an architect of literary tradition.