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
1 - Visual and Verbal Quotation in Flaubert and Eliot
- 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
The act of setting oneself apart from the rest is not a goal. Rather, it is a necessity imposed by the disorder from which one must escape … They were haunted by two biblical images: a mythical image of the lost paradise and an eschatological or apocalyptic image, that of a Jerusalem to be founded.
Michel de Certeau, The Mystic FableOur Hamlet of Europe … is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses – for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.
Paul Valéry, ‘The Crisis of the Mind’In coming to prepare a study on two major works from two definitively ‘modern’ authors – Flaubert's Tentation, which anticipates so many modernist techniques and attitudes, and Eliot's Waste Land, perhaps the pre-eminent poem within the modernist canon – one is first struck by their intensely anachronistic nature, testifying to the fact that modernism is no byword for modernity. Such an impression is derived in no small part from the election by both authors of what Mary Orr terms the ‘anachronistic thematic vehicle’ represented by the saint's trial. Indeed, the manner in which Flaubert and Eliot identified with and portrayed the saint suggests that such a figure symbolized, in part, a rejection of the modern.
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- Information
- Publisher: Pickering & ChattoFirst published in: 2014