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
3 - The Empty Stage: Landscape and the Dramatic in La Tentation de Saint Antoine and The Waste Land
- 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
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.
Ecclesiastes 3:20The experience of the desert is both the place of the Word – where it is supremely word – and the non-place where it loses itself in the infinite.
Edmond Jabès, The Book of MarginsThe 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.
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- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014