Ascetic Modernism in the Work of T S Eliot and Gustave Flaubert

Henry Michael Gott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781848934375
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317318903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Gott examines Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) in conjunction with Gustave Flaubert's La Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874). He provides a highly original reading of both texts and argues that a stylistic affinity exists between the two works.

1 VISUAL AND VERBAL QUOTATION IN FLAUBERT AND ELIOT

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 Fable¹

Our 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’²

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.³ 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. Geoffrey Wall notes Saint Anthony’s appeal to Flaubert’s ‘historical sense’⁴ – that is, the challenge posed to recreate the world of a fourth-century Egyptian hermit. Similarly, Lyndall Gordon criticizes Eliot for his failure to ‘imagine saints in an appropriate contemporary guise’.⁵

The ascetic already represented something of an anachronism in his original context. His longing for solitude conveyed an emphatic, even if implicit, critique of the civilization left behind, while his biography – as it was both lived and written – demanded that his actions conform as closely as possible to an original paradigm that ultimately extended back to Christ’s suffering, the ‘authenticating norm for all actions’.⁶ The ‘new life’ he looked for was always, therefore, as Harpham states, an ‘old and borrowed life’.⁷ Similarly, the pioneering spirit with which the wilderness had been broached soon gave way to a world saturated by the past experiences from which his temptations were derived. Innovation and imitation were found to be contingent upon one another, with the maxim that ‘repetition brings greater security’⁸ born of a sense that ‘our age has become depraved and corrupted’⁹ and that – as Philip Rousseau suggests – the ‘true masters were now dead’.¹⁰ This sense of both a culture and a vocation in decline chimed with Flaubert’s and Eliot’s sense of unease towards the progressive, positivist aspects of contemporary society, and their pursuit of artistic originality was tempered with a need to honour both a wider literary tradition and the more general psychological survival of ‘pastness’.¹¹

Edmund Wilson discerns a kinship between Eliot and Flaubert that rests on their shared sense of ‘the inferiority of the present to the past’, elaborating that each author ‘feels at every turn that human life is now ignoble, sordid or tame, and he is haunted by intimations that it has once been otherwise’.¹² Each work is, from its very outset, imbued with a powerful sense of nostalgia. The recovery of a lost moment becomes a major structural trope, with the journeys on which the two texts embark characterized by the notion of return. Orr notes the retrospective nature of Flaubert’s Tentation, describing how the ‘giant mirror of the Alexandria lighthouse’, the ‘reading of Scripture’ and ‘Antoine’s curriculum vitae’ all exemplify a tendency of ‘looking backwards in time to come forwards’.¹³ The Tentation’s opening narrative occupies itself with lengthy descriptions of both scenic and personal background, with Anthony using up his only opportunity for sustained monologue in regretful wallowing – ‘autrefois pourtant, je n’étais pas si misérable!’¹⁴ The crux of his decline is captured in one desperate image where Anthony remembers how once ‘je sentais comme une fontaine de miséricorde qui s’épanchait du haut du ciel dans mon coeur’, whereas now ‘Elle est tarie. Pourquoi?’¹⁵ Here Flaubert makes clear his project: an investigation of creative block as compared to a crisis of faith, the dearth of artistic inspiration analogous to the absence of God’s grace.

The Waste Land, meanwhile, positions itself as ‘throbbing between two lives’ (l. 218), looking towards both a remembered past and a desired future. The nostalgic cocktail of ‘memory and desire’ (l. 3) is most starkly juxtaposed in the poem’s opening sequence where the arid desert’s ‘heap of broken images’ (l. 22) gives way to a contrasting image of remembered abundance – the encounter in the hyacinth garden. Like Anthony’s recollection of his previously central role (‘On m’envoyait de partout des messages. On venait me voir de très loin’),¹⁶ which modulates into fantasies of Ammonaria and the memory of humiliation in front of the Nicene council, this image in Eliot’s poem becomes clouded by a sense of trauma and sexual failure – giving the iconic past a dual function in the texts as both redemptive and diagnostic. The trauma, particularly its sexual overtones, is in either case associated with a problem of creativity, which is as much the theme of the respective texts as the religious crisis that is their outward context – each constituting in artistic terms what Kafka referred to as a ‘hesitation before birth’,¹⁷ or what Robert Langbaum has called in a critique of Eliot, a ‘fear of … burying the seed that will sprout’.¹⁸

The saint was useful to Flaubert and Eliot, then, not only for the connotation of a specific time and place distinct from their own, but also for his simultaneous affinity with a non-time and a non-place such as the desert represented. In terms of both the personal and the cultural strands of their nostalgia, it was not only a romanticized golden age that was hankered after, but also a vision of prehistory – a before-time – that thrust the individual, as Samuel Beckett writes in ‘Sanies I’,

back in the caul now with no trusts

no fingers no spoiled loves.¹⁹

The longing of both the Tentation and The Waste Land to cast consciousness back to a pre-memorial, embryonic state demonstrates their form-making, regenerative nature. Nostalgia taken to this extreme converts a retrospective outlook into a prospective one, placing its subject in the midst of creation – experiencing a symbolic rebirth that adumbrates the renewal of both personal and cultural resources. This, certainly, is the scenario at the Tentation’s close, implied also in The Waste Land by the drowned gods of ancient ‘vegetation ceremonies’ who form Phlebas’s ancestry.²⁰ The difficulties of expression that accompany such an uncertain project are circumvented in part by the shared paradigm of the saint’s asceticism, which – as a ‘form-producing agent’,²¹ with its own ‘language of self-formation’²² – provides not only a structure and a vocabulary for the act, but also suggests the method of composition heavily reliant on quotation that both texts employ.

Behind Flaubert’s and Eliot’s appreciation of the saint was a longing for escape that was a constant companion to their creative urge. The deeply felt desire to withdraw from worldly demands into some inner ‘elsewhere’ is a prominent theme that runs throughout the oeuvre of either author – from the narrator of Eliot’s ‘Prufrock’, for whom the stifling manners of the social world prompt a longing to retreat to the voiding depths of the ocean floor, to Flaubert’s Emma Bovary, whose reality falls fatally short of the inner life she has nourished with the romantic fancies of her reading. These spaces, the literary and the subaquatic, are – as I describe in the course of this chapter – associated also with the asceticism the two authors depict in The Waste Land and the Tentation.

Although escape represents a major theme in both texts, neither is in any narrow sense escapist. I do not agree with Pound’s and Gourmont’s sense, outlined in my Introduction, that the Tentation represents a facile disengagement on Flaubert’s part from his contemporary milieu. As Orr summarizes, the work expressly engages with, both philosophically and satirically, a number of contemporary trends and debates – religious, scientific and aesthetic – and so draws an analogy between not only the author and his saint (both actual and literary) but between the ‘triplicate’ time frames that mediate them: ‘fourth-century Egypt, medieval Christendom, and nineteenth-century France’.²³ It should be noted that these same time frames are the basis also of The Waste Land’s bold temporal movements; as Jewel Spears Brooker describes, the work represents ‘history … in three large blocks – ancient, medieval, and modern’.²⁴ Nevertheless, in spite of their broad temporal spans, each remains a work (as Richard Drain describes The Waste Land) ‘of the isolated sensibility’, which recognizes that ‘the human dialogue has failed’ and so ‘enters into dialogue with other literature’.²⁵ Flaubert’s fiction, Eliot wrote, pointed to ‘the indestructible barriers between one human being and another’ that were also a major theme of his own work; it was this ‘awful separation’²⁶ that necessitated the movement among a society of texts rather than a human society. In both Eliot and Flaubert, the gregariousness of the text is a function that both circumvents and protects their own isolation – a preservative strategy instituted by the hagiographer’s handling of his subject, where the text gains a special status as a ‘document worthy of reverence, a relic’²⁷ that is analogous, and perhaps even superior to, the saint’s own body, on account of the enhanced geographical and temporal mobility that allowed it to extend the ‘charismatic authority of the holy man’²⁸ without directly compromising the saint’s seeming desire for ‘anonymity and a life in obscurity’.²⁹

In the remainder of the introduction to this chapter I will provide an overview of how citation illustrates some points of contact between Flaubert’s Tentation, Eliot’s Waste Land and the tradition of hagiography that they can to a limited extent be regarded as joining. Indeed, one such area of contiguity is tradition itself. When Foucault calls the Tentation ‘the first literary work whose exclusive domain is that of books’, which ‘serves … to extend the space that existing books can occupy’,³⁰ one is reminded not only of Eliot’s Waste Land and ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ but of hagiography’s own traditions in this respect, which Foucault seems to overlook. We find in Augustine’s Confessions, for example, a virtuoso rendering of this hagiographic trope, which employs as its paradigm Athanasius’s seminal Vita Antonii. This latter text not only influences Augustine’s text but actually plays a decisive role in what is perhaps the book’s central episode. Ponticianus’s reverential recounting of Anthony’s chance hearing of Matthew 19:21 – which prompts Athanasius’s protagonist to reject his wealth in the pursuit of the austere existence of a desert ascetic – introduces, Harpham considers, ‘the concept of the “found text”’ to Augustine’s narrative.³¹ Following this example, an ethereal command to ‘Pick up and read’ directs Augustine to a line from one of Paul’s epistles (Romans 13:13–14) that sets the seal upon what Harpham refers to as a specifically ‘literary’ sort of conversion.³² Such interaction, whereby texts authenticate each other in a two-way parley that mobilizes the old text while stabilizing the new, demonstrates the partial and dependent status that the individual text cultivates through its relation to a literary tradition.

It is important for my purposes here to recognize not only the similarities between the Tentation and Eliot’s poem – in particular their organizing principle and obscured thematic frame – but also their common ancestry in original specimens of saintly literature. For many of his contemporaries, and to the especial delight of Ezra Pound – who had made it his business to ‘boom Eliot’,³³ a desire brought to fruition by his crucial, interventionary role in steering Eliot’s unruly text towards publication – The Waste Land seemed a work without precedent. Eliot had, Pound declared, ‘modernized himself’,³⁴ and the forem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of 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