The emphasis on escape – the original point of departure for my analysis and a persistent underlying theme – as the dominant urge of both the Tentation and The Waste Land, and a crucial facet of the ascetic's appeal to Flaubert and Eliot, foregrounds the vital role that space has to play in each; after all, as Lyndall Gordon observes, ‘the exile oft en cultivates the spirit of place’. My analysis in this chapter focuses on the use of landscape (physical space) and the dramatic (imaginative space) in the two texts. The impact of these two forms of space cannot be regarded as distinct; they are as embroiled with one another as are the saint's own physical and imaginative operations, of which they constitute an extension. Each is both the setting and the substance of the simultaneously forming and deforming project of the two works – where a sense of erasure accompanies every written gesture, and every affirmation is made to drag along its negation.