The Powers of Horror in “The Love Song of St. Sebastian”
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
THE POWERS OF HORROR IN “THE LOVE SONG OF ST. SEBASTIAN” AND “THE DEATH OF SAINT NARCISSUS”: A STUDY OF ABJECTION AND JOUISSANCE IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY MARTYR POEMS A Thesis Presented to the faculty of the Department of English California State University Sacramento Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS in English (Literature) by Brendan Michael Johnston SPRING 2012 ©2012 Brendan Michael Johnston ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii THE POWERS OF HORROR IN “THE LOVE SONG OF ST. SEBASTIAN” AND “THE DEATH OF SAINT NARCISSUS”: A STUDY OF ABJECTION AND JOUISSANCE IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY MARTYR POEMS A Thesis by Brendan Michael Johnston Approved by: _______________________________, Committee Chair Dr. Joshua McKinney _______________________________, Second Reader Dr. Bradley Buchanan ______________________________ Date iii Student: Brendan Michael Johnston I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for the thesis. ________________________, Graduate Coordinator ____________________ Dr. David Toise Date Department of English iv Abstract of THE POWERS OF HORROR IN “THE LOVE SONG OF ST. SEBASTIAN” AND “THE DEATH OF SAINT NARCISSUS”: A STUDY OF ABJECTION AND JOUISSANCE IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY MARTYR POEMS by Brendan Michael Johnston The purpose of this essay is to perform a close examination of two of T. S. Eliot’s early, uncollected poems, entitled “The Love Song of St. Sebastian” and “The Death of Saint Narcissus.” One of the problems that arises in an appraisal of these poems is that they rest uneasily alongside his more prominent texts. Their psycho- sexual, masochistic fixation clashes with the more austere, detached portrayals of sexuality in his later poetry, and the confessional nature of the poems also conflicts with his declared poetics of impersonality that he describes famously in his essays “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “The Functions of Criticism.” This essay undertakes a psychoanalytic reading of both of these poems, and also explores the persistence of their influence in his later work. The research includes a number of primary, secondary, and tertiary texts. I have drawn heavily from Eliot’s own writings: his poetry, his essays, and also some of his lectures. His discussion of the differences between “classical mysticism” and v “romantic mysticism” in The Clark Lectures is an important touchstone in the explorations of the essay. My psychoanalytic reading is also grounded in the works of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, as well as the French Surrealist, Georges Bataille. In my second chapter I have made use of the ideas from Lacan’s first and third seminars to explore the symptoms of psychosis and neurosis in Eliot and his early poetic personas, Sebastian and Narcissus. And in my third chapter I use the Kristevan idea of abjection from her work Powers of Horror to accentuate the peculiar blend of “torture and delight,” “divine ecstasy and extreme horror” exhibited in Eliot’s sick saints. Also, Laurie MacDiarmid and Donald Childs, are two recent Eliot historians and critics that have figured prominently in triangulating my own reading of Eliot and his writings. My research has revealed that, as much as Eliot created these saints to be examples of “sick spirituality” and a failed “romantic” mysticism, the unmistakable passion and jouissance that arises out of their abjection reveals that Eliot, the doubting neurotic, actually desires their psychotic certainty. He revisits the subject of martyrdom for a final time in his later play The Cocktail Party. It is here that he gives his final saint, Celia Copplestone, a more orthodox martyrdom, stripped of the blasphemy and narcissism of his earlier saints. While in the play she is the scapegoat and intercessor for the other characters that are trapped in banality the Modern world, more importantly she is Eliot’s own scapegoat. And like Saint Narcissus and vi Sebastian, she achieves in her abjected, macabre, eroticized martyrdom the divine ecstasy that Eliot can only desire after but never personally achieve. ________________________________, Committee Chair Dr. Joshua McKinney ________________________________ Date vii DEDICATION To Dr. Joshua McKinney, Dr. Brad Buchanan, and Dr. David Toise. Dr. McKinney, for your amazing seminar on Eliot in the spring of 2009. It was the catalyst that inspired this essay. Dr. Buchanan, for your continual encouragement to pursue the thesis as the culmination of my Masters experience. And Dr. Toise, for introducing me to the critical theories of Lacan and Kristeva (among many others), and your insistence of the joy and freedom at the endless possibilities in reading texts. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Dedication……………………………………………………………………………viii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………1 2. “A LITTLE BIT THE HERO OF MY VERSE”: THE NEUROTIC POET’S DESIRE FOR PSYCHOTIC CERTAINTY………………………………………9 “The Love Song of St. Sebastian”....................................................................13 “The Death of Saint Narcissus”………………………………………………22 Eliot’s Neurotic Desire and Narcissus’s and Sebastian’s Psychotic Jouissance……………………………………………………………………..29 3. “FEAR IN A HANDFUL OF DUST”: THE POWERS OF HORROR IN T. S. ELIOT’S EARLY POETRY AND THE PERSISTENCE OF ABJECTION IN HIS LATER WRITINGS…………………………………………………….......45 Abjection in “St. Sebastian” and “Saint Narcissus”.........................................45 The Cocktail Party……………………………………………………………54 4. CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………...68 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………..71 ix 1 Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION “Obviously, it is not enough for the subject to have selected a part of the text of what there is to say, while thrusting the rest aside, in the hope that with the part, things will hang together. There are always things that don’t hang together. This is an obvious fact, if we don’t begin with the idea that inspires all classical, academic psychology, which is that human beings are, as they say, adapted beings, because they are living, and therefore it must all hang together. You are not a psychoanalyst if you accept this.” Jacques Lacan, Seminar III “The Psychoses” After nearly a century of critique on the poetry of T. S. Eliot, it is difficult to strike a new channel into Eliot’s oeuvre. Far from being uncharted waters, the zones and demarcations of critique and inquiry have shifted and have been ceaselessly re- oriented over the 20th century, yielding a hyper-exhaustive assemblage of critiques as fragmented and cacophonic as The Waste Land itself. Unlike many other literary figures of the past, Eliot was certainly well-received and even embraced in his own time—both by academics and the broader poetic culture. His ideas on poetic aesthetic, Modernity, and literary criticism influenced the rising literary movement of the New Critics towards the end of his life; and they have certainly echoed in the close-reading formalism of literary pedagogy that has persisted even up to the present day. With the rise of Deconstruction and the broader Linguistic turn in literary studies, aspects of Eliot’s seminal texts such as The Waste Land and Four Quartets, have demonstrated, even presaged, the disparity between the signifier and the signified, the undecidablity of meaning, the failure of language, “the heap of broken images” (Eliot, Collected 2 Poems (CP) 53). However the most recent Social turn in literary criticism has moved decidedly on the attack, both towards his poetics and his personal life, interchangeably using one as the justification to excoriate the other. Social theory had made mincemeat of the austere, erudite, WASPish, exclusionary Modernist and his fascistic cohorts (i.e. Ezra Pound, Wyndam Lewis), and for very good reason. One need only read some of Eliot’s post-conversion, pre-WWII lectures (later furiously suppressed) to realize that Eliot very much professed deep-seated notions of intellectual, cultural, and even racial superiority, not identical but certainly adjacent to many of the Fascistic movements of the time. Many critics have also pointed out his unconscionable treatment of his first wife Vivienne. Their final separation was a result of Eliot consigning her to a mental institution for the remainder of her life. His chauvinism, his cultural elitism cannot be, and has not been overlooked in recent criticism. But these vitriolic appraisals of Eliot’s personal life and poetic persona, while enlightening and very well-founded, too often dwell on his own faults and inconsistencies as a way to decry the hypocrisy and failure of Modernism. Eliot’s personal and literary transgressions become the scapegoat by we which reify our own new culture of criticism and literary aesthetic. As Laurie MacDiarmid asserts in the introduction to her essay on Eliot’s religious eroticism, perhaps in many ways our attack on Eliot is, at times, a transference of our own contemporary faults and insecurities. As she argues in her introduction, 3 We demand that authors reflect our most proper politics, or conversely, that the authors we read confirm our political convictions. The “fact” that we continue to write about Eliot in anything but the most scathing terms serves as the preeminent symptom in our own case histories as incipient haters…A reexamination of our own reactions to Eliot’s developing social poetic, may show us much about our own reconstruction of such matters as sexuality, poetics, politics and spirituality. Perhaps as we recoil from what we see as Eliot’s corrosive “conservatism,” we safeguard our own. (xvii-xviii). To MacDiarmid it would seem that too often Eliot and his “damned Modernism” have become convenient whipping boys; that, in a biblical sense, we are pointing out the mote in Eliot’s eye while ignoring the log in our own. While MacDiarmid’s circumspect reading of Eliot is productive for new-century criticism, this is certainly not to assert that Eliot’s poetic and personal faults were miniscule. Indeed, there is a tremendous tree-trunk of hypocrisy and transgression that overshadows Eliot’s aesthetics and his personal life.