Sites of Sign-Production and Interpretation; T.S. Eliot’s Semiotic Aesthetics-Poetics

T.S. Eliot’s query in The Waste Land, “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” may be said to sum up the hermeneutic situation of any language act, whether of sign production or interpretation. Whereas traditional topoi of expressionist aesthetics, such as the artist’s subjectivity, empirical psychology, truthfulness, intentionality, etc. have become irrelevant in the heteroglot discourse of the most famous dirge on the decaying West, Eliot’s awareness of the matrical role of cultural semiosis allows us to place him among the founding fathers of semiotic aesthetics. Rooted in the insights of Charles Sanders Peirce and Martin Heidegger (“Destruktion”, 1920), and enlarged by post-war contributors, such as Roland Barthes (Mythologies, 1957, [1], Umberto Eco (Trattato di semiotica generale, 1975) Michel Foucault (L’archeologie du savoir,1969), Rene Girard (Mensonge romantique et verite Romanesque, 1961), and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari (Mille plateaux, 1980), the semiotic approach to art makes interpretation dependent on a mediating third (Peirce: the Interpretant), which is variously related to context, regime of signification, episteme, schemata, triangulation of desire. Our archaeology of T.S. Eliot’s contextual knowledge allows us to complete the poet’s own hypertext, which functions as a key to interpretation, and to fill in the meaning structure of The Waste Land, whose fragmentation and abrupt shifts in space and time make it look like a puzzle. In this essay, we are interested in digging up the innermost circle of reference, which is the historical context of the poet’s conversation with Marie Larisch, a cousin of Bavarian King Ludwig II, in the opening of the poem. In our attempt to retrieve the land under erasure, surfacing through allusions in the fictional “Waste Land”, we are taking a journey through Neuschwanstein and environs.