Dada Da Da: Sounding the Jew in Modernism

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Few would describe The Waste Land as easy to read. And indeed, most critics would agree that noone should find it easy, since, as Ian Hamilton remarked in 1970, wanted poem to be difficult and no doubt conceived of its as an important aspect of its total meaning.' Where New Critics had admired such high-modernist obscurity, Hamilton criticized difficulty of poem's wealth of cultural allusion for its aristocratic aloofness, a determination to keep up of class.2 More recently still, sense of poem's intentional has been identified as mark not only of a selfconsciously high modernism, but of a specifically white modernism, so Eliot's hermeneutic barriers are understood to be not just a class issue, as Hamilton thought, but a racial problem. Houston Baker, Jr.'s Modernism and Harlem Renaissance thus argues that Eliot's functioned as a form of literary segregation, delimiting the tradition as a white enclave. As Baker puts it, the 'tongue' of Eliot's collaged allusiveness was unknown to Harlem audiences of The New Negro writers.3 Baker's general claim, that African-American modernism had little in common with Joycean or Eliotic projects, hinges on his understanding of European avant-garde writing not as a purely formal project, nor simply as a consolidation of what Hamilton calls cultural wealth, but as invention of an alternative language.4 What separates Eliot's modernism from Harlem Renaissance is that Eliot wrote in a tongue that was unknown in Harlem.