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Article: Tom and Vivien Eliot do narrative in different voices: mixing genres in the Waste Land's pub.(Critical essay)
- Article from:
- Narrative
- Article date:
- October 1, 2008
- Author:
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"He do the police in different voices," T.S. Eliot's original title for the poem that became The Waste Land, announces the poem's interest in voices and in the types of readerly performance made possible by narrative fiction. (1) Borrowed from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865), the phrase is taken from the mouth of "old Betty Higden, a poor widow," who describes the reading practices of Sloppy, a foundling who reads Betty the newspaper out loud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices" (198). (2) Eliot's allusive gesture thus describes a specific type of reader--a working-class reader who surprises ...