A Game of Chess

If any of you reading this have ever read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, you will probably agree that it is not the most easy of reads that poetry has to offer.  Eliot’s constant allusions to and fragments of other works, some in languages other than English, give the poem a disjointed and ambiguous feel and make reading the poem quite sluggish and arduous to say the least.  As I was reading this for the class I am currently engaged in online (Modern British Poetry), one of my assignments was to theorize what Eliot’s intentions might have been in writing so obscurely in this poem.  I answered that I thought he may have been using obscurity to promote a feeling of disillusionment in the reader that mirrored the disillusionment of the time of the poem’s composition—the dawning of the modern age of science and industry, the “death of religion” (as some saw it), and the suffering of the aftermath of the first World War. 

Although I still believe this could have been his intention, I just recently read an article by Caterina Fornero that promotes another theory.  In her article “Chess Is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King:  The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land,” Fornero suggests that Eliot’s title for the second section of the poem, A Game of Chess, describes how the poem truly functions as a whole.  She explains that Ferdinand De Saussure uses the picture of a game of chess to illustrate how linguistic signs are characterized—their “arbitrariness, oppositional negativity and differentiality” (Fornero, paragraph 9).  She goes on to claim that the obscure fragments and references that Eliot uses throughout the poem create a linguistic system similar to that which Saussure describes.  Because Eliot uses these fragments in ways in which they no longer reflect what they did in their original works (he instead just pastes them piece-meal over the text of the poem), they, like Saussure’s linguistic signs, become arbitrary.  Now, instead of finding meaning in the context of their original texts, these fragments extract their value from their relations to one another within Eliot’s text, and so they exhibit the characteristics of differentiality and oppositional negativity (in that they no longer have a positive identity in themselves but only an identity that comes from how they are relate differentially with other parts of the text).  Fornero says, “The semantic functioning of The Waste Land as a map of intersecting relations is thus a semantic model in its own right” (paragraph 11), and the title of the second section, A Game of Chess, becomes a clue to how the poem functions as a whole.  In fact, she asserts that this title, which is itself a reference from Middleton, is an example of Saussure’s theory in that it functions completely opposite of its original function in Middleton’s works.

Fornero goes on to explain that the illustration of the chess game is somewhat an imperfect analogy for the linguistic system because of the game piece of the King.  The King in the game is an autonomous piece that does not derive its value from its relationship to the other pieces and therefore acts the part of a type of central authority in the game.  She explains, though, that Eliot deals with this issue of the King by citing several images of dead, impotent, or toppled kings throughout The Waste Land.  Of course, in reading this, I immediately began to think of the time in which this poem was composed and how the culture seemed to truly lack a central authority in which the majority of people trusted.  Much of what I have read about this time alludes to how many of the people feel like religion and government had failed them, and they were looking for something in which to put their faith.  The Waste Land certainly embodies this feeling of wandering and uncertainty where a central authority for culture has been overthrown.

I really enjoyed Fornero’s analysis of the title A Game of Chess as it relates to The Waste Land.  I feel like her ideas still mesh well with my own thoughts about the feelings of disillusionment that the poem creates in that the arbitrariness and differentiality of the fragments work to create and push forward this kind of feeling.

Work Cited:

Fornero, Caterina.  “Chess Is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King:  The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.”  Yeats Eliot Review 22.5 (2005):  2+.  Literature Resources from Gale.  Web.  4 Sept. 2011.