In this chapter I extend the focus on space in the foregoing analysis to provide an examination of form in the Tentation and The Waste Land, whose long gestational periods were plagued by structural anxieties. Both Eliot and Flaubert were authors for whom the completion of a text that satisfied their sensibility was a laboured and convoluted process. Henry James remarked of Flaubert that he ‘felt of his vocation almost nothing but the difficulty’, while Erik Svarny makes a similar observation regarding Eliot, considering him a ‘poet who found the production of poetry exacting and difficult’. Although Gourmont considers that part of what distinguishes the Tentation from a work like Madame Bovary is the relative ease of its composition, consonant with Flaubert's description of it as ‘alors bien dans ma nature’, it is my contention here that – as with The Waste Land – the text's intimate relation to the author's own creative processes inflicts a very particular set of problems, which I detail in the course of this chapter.

My discussion consolidates many of the findings of the first three chapters to show how the structural idiosyncrasies of the two works correspond to the experience of the ‘peculiar being’ that the saint embodies.