California State University, Sacramento

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 "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 Sebastian, she achieves in her abjected, macabre, eroticized martyrdom the divine ecstasy that Eliot can only desire after but never personally achieve.

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

Brendan Michael Johnston

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