Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Visual and Verbal Quotation in Flaubert and Eliot
- 2 Figuring the Saint: Physical and Intellectual Representations of Asceticism
- 3 The Empty Stage: Landscape and the Dramatic in La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land
- 4 The Ascetic Text of La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land
- 5 ‘Caught in the Circle of Desire’: The Vortex as Ascetic Metaphor
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
2 - Figuring the Saint: Physical and Intellectual Representations of Asceticism
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Visual and Verbal Quotation in Flaubert and Eliot
- 2 Figuring the Saint: Physical and Intellectual Representations of Asceticism
- 3 The Empty Stage: Landscape and the Dramatic in La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land
- 4 The Ascetic Text of La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land
- 5 ‘Caught in the Circle of Desire’: The Vortex as Ascetic Metaphor
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In this chapter I examine the idea of ‘complete knowledge’ as Eliot and Flaubert present it, showing how it involves a negotiation between opposing terms, such as I have already observed as characteristic of the stratified model to which the Tentation and The Waste Land both conform, and the ascetic paradigm – an escape that is also an immersion – that it replicates. Here the ‘grande synthèse’ to which each author aspires is described in terms of the extremes of objectivity and subjectivity offered by scientific and religious knowledge, whose collaboration each author represents as both possible and necessary. The control and abandon by which the respective pursuits are characterized is first addressed in this introduction through an analysis of the use of water metaphors by the two authors.
Submarine imagery recurs throughout Eliot's and Flaubert's respective oeuvres. In Eliot – as well as the aforementioned ‘Prufrock’, which ends ‘in the chambers of the sea / By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown’ – there is ‘Mr. Apollinax’, whose laughter is
… submarine and profound
Like the old man of the sea's
Hidden under coral islands
Where worried bodies of drowned men drift down in the green silence,
Dropping from fingers of surf.
The description here clearly echoes the situation of Phlebas, whose presence in The Waste Land is prefigured by his occurrence in the French poem ‘Dans le Restaurant‘.
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- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014