A Literary Mystery

He's arguably the 20^th century's most famous Phoenician: Phlebas, the uncrowned Fisher King of T. S. Eliot's monumental 1929 poem The Wasteland.

IV. Death by Water

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and the loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

“Death by Water” has haunted me since first I committed it to memory as a graduate student years ago.

Perhaps because the lament for Phlebas is the lone entirely comprehensible section in Eliot's ruined city of a poem, it has gone oddly undiscussed by critics. Apparently, it has never occurred to even a single commentator to ask about the name itself.

In fact, it has much to tell us.

Because of its triconsonantal root and Greek ending, I initially assumed Phlebas to be a historical Phoenician name as preserved in Greek form by some Hellenic historian. As a simple web search will demonstrate, however, such is not the case. There was no historical Phlebas the Phoenician.

Nor, in fact, is the name even Phoenician. What appears to be a standard three-letter Semitic root is actually a meaningless jumble. There is no √FLB root in Phoenician, or in any other Semitic language.

In fact, the name derives from Greek: a fictional name, created by Eliot himself, for a fictional character.

While the Greek word φλεψ phleps, “vein,” which becomes phleb- when declined, might not itself be known to the moderately-well-educated reader of early 20th century Modernist poetry, the term phlebotomy, “vein-cutting,” likely would be, the name given to the ancient and medieval medical practice of drawing blood for curative purposes, according to the old Four Humors theory of human health.

While “Vein” might seem an odd name to give a character, it makes sense in the context of the poem when one considers the vein as conduit of blood, i.e. life.

Phlebas, the Phoenician tin merchant drowned on a commercial voyage off the coast of Cornwall—in antiquity, the British Isles were known for their main commodity, necessary in the making of bronze, as the “Tin Islands”—is the Dying God of Eliot's Wasteland. His appearance is foreshadowed earlier in the poem, in the poem's first section, Burial of the Dead.

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

There is, of course, no such card in the Tarot deck.

In fact, though, Phlebas is the heart of the entire poem, the uncrowned Fisher King of Eliot's Wasteland.

Like Ferdinand in Shakespeare's The Tempest, alluded to in the last line of the passage cited above, Phlebas has suffered the “sea-change” of literary immortality, transformed into something truly “rich and strange.”

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome, and tall, as you.