The “Montage of Attractions” in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

The article deals with the importance of the music hall for The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot. This form of entertainment art, at first glance, does not fit well with the deep religious and philosophical message that is traditionally seen in the poem, but it is attracting more and more attention from researchers. The term “music hall” in the article refers to a type of theater that was represented by the English music hall, the American minstrel shows, vaudeville and musical comedy of Eliot's youth, the Parisian variety theater which he came to know intimately in the early 1910s, and revue. The English music hall was chosen to refer to the phenomenon because it was the one that occupied Eliot's imagination at the time when The Waste Land was being written. The article describes T.S. Eliot as a music hall habitué in the 1910s — early 1920s, his essays on the music hall in the magazines Dial and Tyro are analyzed. The author proves that the importance of the music hall song for The Waste Land is not limited to the usage of the rhythm and any kind of musical technique. The songs are not important in themselves, but as part of the performance. The fragment that opens the first version of the poem is a striking revelation of the music hall. The fragment is read as representing the music hall performance, starting with the motive of a “hot night” and ending with quotes from various music hall songs. From the same point of view, the original title of the poem is analysed. The presence of the music hall in the final version of The Waste Land is shown in connection with the characters from the working class and the image of Tiresias. The general principle on which the artistic whole is built in The Waste Land is presented as reproducing the structure of a music hall performance; the author takes the name “montage of attractions” for it from S. Eisenstein.