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The metaphor of the game of chess, which T.S.Eliot crystallised in the final version of The Waste Land, functions as a structural node that coordinates the dynamics of meaning within the poem. By substituting the original title and subtitle of section II "He Do the Police in Different Voices (part ID" and "In the Cage" with "A Game of Chess" Eliot shifted the focus from a mode of inter-textual discourse to an intra-textual model of significance, given by the synchronic network of relations holding between the fragments in a de-centred literary circuit.
That T.S.Eliot was a keen chess player is in no doubt. Games of chess are documented as early as 1916 in a letter which Eliot, who was then living in Crawford Street in London, addressed to his mother on 6th September 1916. In this letter he enclosed chess games for his father in a long-distance game which father and son played by post across the Atlantic1.
But how the game of chess worked its way into The Waste Land and came to be elected as a structural metaphor was a matter of substitutions in the permutations that took place between the original manuscript and the final version of the poem.
In the original manuscript the title and sub-title of section II were "He Do the Police in Different Voices (part II)"2and"IntheCage" 3 and there were two references to chess: one in line 62 ("and we shall play a game of chess"), and one in line 63 ("the ivory men make company between us"). Only line 62 survived the joint pruning of Eliot, Pound and Eliot's first wife Vivien. In the final version the title of section II became "A Game of Chess", which replaced both the previous title and sub-title, and line 63 was eliminated, at Vivien's request.
The impact of these substitutions was twofold. First, by eliminating the various voices of "He Do the Police in Different Voices" and "In the Cage" he abandoned the idea of a "central intelligence" (in the Jamesian phrase) that coordinated inter-textual echoes and introduced the idea of echoes that regulate themselves according to intra-textual rules, like in a game of chess, where moves are never directed from the outside, but are always determined by the...