Enacting the Obituary: The “Successful Failure” of T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This article reassesses T.S. Eliot’s The Elder Statesman (1959) in terms of the poet’s conflicted engagement with ritual tragedy, the music hall, and mid-century naturalism. Beginning with a reading of Eliot’s essay on the death of the music-hall icon Marie Lloyd in 1922, the article describes the ways in which the obituary prefigures his later turn to the bourgeois stage. The article sets The Elder Statesman against its ancient forebear – Sophocles’s Oedipus at Colonus – and highlights the ways in which Eliot’s deflation of Greek tragedy delivers a critical commentary on the authority of the literary tradition, the abstractions of modernist poetics, and the conventions of twentieth-century naturalism. The Elder Statesman’s reduction of texts to their bare material utility reveals Eliot’s ironic awareness of dramaturgical necessity, and a renewed emphasis on the actor discovers what remains after the collapse of theatrical, cultural, and textual ideals.