New Modes of Characterization in The Waste Land 155Nothing?’”—the protagonist answers: “I remember/ [The hyacinth garden.]
Those are pearls that were his eyes [, yes!]” The Hyacinth garden (love) and
Ariel’s song (drowning) are related as forms of natural salvation (love is a kind
of drowning). This attempt at recovery is the pattern of the Grail Quest; in
most versions, a vision or fleeting sight of the Grail leads to the Quest to
recover the Grail.
The Waste Landis about sexual failure as a sign of spiritual failure. This
is made especially clear by the deleted opening passage about a rowdy
Irishman, on an all-night binge, who lands in a brothel but is too drunk to
have intercourse. The original draft then shifts to “April is the cruellest
month”—about upper-class people who, like the Irishman, fail in sex not
because they are practicing Christian abstinence but because of spiritual
torpor. The vegetation myths are better than Christianity for diagnosing
modern sexual failure; for the myths make clear that sex and religion spring
from the same impulse and that sexual and religious fulfillment are related.
To understand how far Eliot has come in his treatment of sex and in his
concepts of character and identity, we have only to compare the memory of
the Hyacinth garden with a corresponding memory in the early poem,
written in French, “Dans le Restaurant.” In the French poem, a dirty
broken-down waiter recalls an amorous experience under a tree in the rain
when he was only seven and the little girl was even younger. She was soaking
wet, he gave her primroses and tickled her to make her laugh. He
experienced a moment of power and ecstasy. But he too lost his vision, for a
big dog came along and he became scared and deserted her; he has never
fulfilled the promise of that moment. The customer to whom he has insisted
on telling this story remarks on his physical filthiness as a way of separating
the waiter from himself: “What right have you to experiences like mine?”
The customer gives the waiter ten sous for a bath.
The poem escapes from this sordid situation by taking a quite
unprepared-for leap to the cleansing by drowning of Phlebas the Phoenician,
a character for whom we have not been in the least prepared.
Phlébas, le Phénicien, pendant quinze jours noyé,
Oubliait les cris des mouettes et la houle de Cornouaille,
Et les profits et les pertes....The sudden contrast affords welcome relief. Since Part IVof The Waste Land
is an English revision of this passage:
Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,