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Beyond the Waste Land: An Interpretation of John Whiting's Saints Day

FROM ITS FIRST PERFORMANCE IN 1951 the obscurity of John Whiting's Saint's Day has caused anger. It was Whiting's first major work and he did not know how much to expect from his audience. I believe he was so at home in its world of mysterious coincidences and symbolic acts that he saw no need for detailed explanation; and since the play is highly original the spectators were bound to be baffled. But then Whiting kept telling us not to worry about analysing symbols but to allow the playas a whole to work on our senses. And in that area at least one cannot deny its force. Moreover Whiting deliberately uses ambiguity with the purpose of upsetting our expectations and involving us immediately in the chaotic world of his play. Yet part of the obscurity can be illuminated by careful examination and with the help of the manuscripts,! which tend to be more explicit than the final text. Whiting begins the first handwritten manuscript of 1946 with two quotations. One of them is taken from Lewis Mumford's The Condition of Man (1944). Since this book furnishes important clues to the meaning of Saint's Day it will be discussed in some detail later in this article. Mumford tries to identify the forces of destruction which threaten our age; he presents a frightening picture of the "barbarism and dissolution" of our world. Whiting tried to capture by means of theater and poetry what Mumford analysed discursively, this sense of the immanent threat of chaos; and although, obviously, Whiting did not merely dramatise Mumford's ideas, the book deserves notice in this article since it does throw light on the dark world of Saint's Day. The second motto is a quotation from T. H. Huxley's "Descartes' Discourse on Method":