Bleistein and St Sebastian

Andrea Mantegna's "St Sebastian" (Ca d'Oro, Venice).

As we can see in stanzas four through six, there are a number of similarities between what happens to Bleistein and St. Sebastian. First of all, the description of Bleistein in the first paragraph resembles that of the martyred St. Sebastian, who also has his palms turned out, his elbows bent, as well as one knee. There is also one staring eye, and although because of the shadow this cannot be seen clearly, the differing position of the left eyebrow seems to suggest that the other eye is closed (#! further detailed study of this painting or at least a larger reproduction will be necessary to confirm this).

Eliot invites us to draw a parallel between St. Sebastian and Bleistein; there are certainly paralels with Bleistein's memory of the insults against Shylock. These insults, if we read their imagery literally, also provide a link; the Jew that Bleistein remembers was perhaps killed and dumped on the street - if we examine instances of combinations of lustreless with staring eyes this often means dead - with garbage and rats on him, which seems not wholly dissimilar from St. Sebastian's fate of ending up in a sewer - there will, at the very least, also be rats there.

One historical implication is that the Jew Bleistein assumes the role of martyr similar to the position of the Christians in the Roman empire. Certainly, if we do compare the situation of the Jews in a historical context, a striking parallel exists between the constant and persistent persecutions of the Jews since Christianity rose to power in Europe, and the persecutions of the Christians by the Romans when they were still an oppressed group together with the Hebrew people. Furthermore, arrows are traditionally also symbols of verbal assaults, something which Jews have been historically prone to, not the least during the strong rise of anti-Semitism from the turn of the century up to WWII.

The association between the Jews as Martyrs against the Christians as martyrs seems to be the central image, Pound's architectonics, the rest are the details. The comparison is painful, and the irony indeed, as Eliot himself said several times in his letters, "intensely serious." Whether it is also far-fetched remains to be seen. Eliot himself wrote, in 1918, that "A large part of any poet's "inspiration" must come from his reading and from his knowledge of history." (T.S. Eliot, To-Day, September 1918). It does not seem far fetched that he was specifically thinking of Burbank when writing this line, as we shall see elsewhere. Apart from that, there is the influence of the controversial new Joyce novel, Ulysses, which was appearing in the Little Review during 1917-18, and was greatly admired by both Eliot and Pound:

Bloom also is the basis of democracy; he is the man in the street, the next man, the public, not our public, but Mr Wells' public; for Mr Wells he is Hocking's public, he is l'homme moyen sensuel; he is also Shakespeare, Ulysses, The Wandering Jew, the Daily Mail reader, the man who believes what he sees in the papers, everyman, and 'the goat'.(403)
Bloom suffers kata thumon; 'every fellow mousing round for his liver and his lights' (404)

...wrote Pound in 1923, but already in 1918 he had already compared Bloom with the Venus of Milo. Because of Pound's later anti-Semitism he himself has become the victim of prejudice and is often no longer ascribed the judgment which he conveyed in The Egoist, in 1913, that:

If you have forgotten my statement that the arts bear witness and define for us the inner nature and conditions of man, consider the Victory of Samothrace and the Taj of Agra. The man who carved the one and the man who designed the other may either or both of them have looked like an ape, or like two apes respectively. They may have looked like other apelike or swinelike men. We have the Victory and the Taj to witness that there was something within them differing from the contents of apes and of other swinelike men. Thus we learn that humanity is a species or genus of animals capable of a variation that will produce the desire for a Taj or a Victory, and moreover capable of effecting that Taj or Victory in stone.

Just as Sweeney is associated with Pound's metaphor of medicine, and is there in Eliot's poetry to cure the disease of modern theorists, especially those on sex, so Bleistein is here to cure Burbank's naivete and prediliction for the exterior. This was a disease which Pound also ascribed to James, and in a sense, Bleistein is here to cure one of James' weaknesses.

See also:
Bleistein's way

critical overview