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"Consider Phlebas," the poet tells us as we read "Death by Water," the fourth, shortest, and apparently pivotal section ofT.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. "Afortnightdead,"hisbones picked by "[a] current under the sea," Phlebas has drowned, it seems, and now, as he is "[ejntering the whirlpool," Phlebas's fate, we are led to assume, is supposed in some way to mimic our own, "Gentile or Jew." And yet it is not a very easy task to accomplish - to take him, that is, "who was once handsome and tall as us" into consideration. For, all punning aside, the details of his life otherwise are rather barebones. We know that he is a Phoenician, the son of an ancient people from the Eastern Mediterranean renowned for their skill and daring as mariners and so, in keeping with that trade, merchants as well. We know as well, especially if we are particularly careful readers - as if any reader of Eliot's poetry is anything but - that the speaker of The Waste Land had already been warned by the notoriously intense clairvoyant, Madame Sosostris, that the speaker's card as she reads the Tarot for him is "the drowned Phoenician Sailor" and that there is also a one-eyed merchant carrying something on his back but which she is "forbidden to see." So, then, as an apparent result, the speaker should "[f]ear death by water."
We know, too, that this sailor, whose textual calling card is the tag from Ariel's song in the The Tempest, "those are pearls that were his eyes," reappears momentarily in the civilized altercation that the bored and distracted middle-class couple have in the opening of Part II, "A Game of Chess," and then again in Part 111, where there are further allusions to The Tempest and where, as well, "Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant," apparently attempts to arrange a weekend tryst with the speaker "in demotic French."
Whatever may be made of all that, it is doubtful that it has ever left any reader perfectly satisfied once it came time to "[c]onsider Phlebas," however. A reader hoping for more information might then turn to that old standby for securing an obscure meaning from any Eliot poem, the source of the textual allusion, only to discover that,...