Overview

In T.S. Eliot's Postmodernist Complaint Paul Murphy presents a radical and illuminating analysis of the most significant of T.S. Eliot's early and middle period verse. Refracting this work through Lacan's reworking of Freud's analytic work on the Oedipus Complex, Murphy portrays Eliot as a literary and social revolutionary:

"Each persona is a mask behind which the author manages to negate the signs of his presence — the humble London bank clerk merges into Prufrock, the young suitor, the lady, Saint Narcissus and Gerontion. The suffering of the artist is transmuted into these 'deliberate disguises', so that the signs of his presence are erased just as much as they are transmuted or metamorphosed... Eliot's doctrine of impersonality is the perfect metaphor for the alienation of the artist, as he attempts to evade what may be termed 'self-expression'. Finally, art itself is brought into question, Eliot's disintegrative poetics maintain the devious path language takes in poetry to question the foundations of that language, and to thereby renew it, or to revolutionise it."

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