We’ve just finished listening to a radio adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. It was certainly an interesting experience, although it has left me with mixed responses to it. I know the poem well, as you will appreciate if you have looked through my “galleries”. The first thing we noted was that my wife’s impression was more positive than mine, because the radio-presentation often challenged or modified my own established interpretation of it. She was able to listen to it with as fresh ear.
It is remarkable the extent to which Eliot’s poem now crops up in subsequent contexts. Any the moment my bed-time reading is the novel by Howard Jacobson, Live a Little. It had escaped my notice that in one passage, dealing with somebody who tells fortunes by reading the cards, Jacobson is clearly making reference to a passage in The Waste Land.
I’m very much torn in my appreciation of the addition of various sound effects to the reading of the poem. On the one hand I am aware that Eliot himself wrote dramatic works for radio, so that today’s performance can be listened to as belonging in that tradition. On the other hand, the addition of these extra “layers” to the experience turns it into something that is no longer the poem which Eliot published. Have we been given too much information?
I’m left with an interesting thought. How would I respond if somebody decided that it might be a good idea to exhibit some of my pictures, and had insisted that the viewing experience should be accompanied by the playing of music, and other sound effects, and perhaps even a kind of “commentary” composed not only of the spoken word but even changing light effects?