Victorian wit, novelist, playwright and poet.

In May 2006, Morrissey posed in Uncut magazine as St. Sebastian and as a Christ-like figure enhanced by supernatural light. “I live a life that befits a priest virtually. (…) I live a saintly life,” he said in 1983 (NME interview). Many critics have highlighted the singer’s troubled connections with Catholicism. In this research, I want to draw attention to “Daoist” themes in Morrissey’s art and personality that are at least as obvious as the Christian “priestly” ones, suggesting that the singer’s peculiar mixture of the ascetic-spiritual and the agnostic-skeptical can be better explained through an exploration of Daoism than through the artist’s presumed tortuous Catholic anti-Catholicism. Gavin Hopps quotes from Harvey Cox’s interpretation of contemporary theology, The Feast of Fools (1969), where Cox writes: “Like the jester, Christ defies custom and scorns crowned heads. Like a wandering troubadour he has no place to lay his head. Like the clown in the circus parade, he satirizes existing authority by riding into town replete with regal pageantry when he has no earthly power” (Cox: 140). Hopps applies this statement to Morrissey, but Cox could as well have disserted about the wandering and mocking Zhuangzi, whose irony and wit combined with sacrifice and renunciation, whose intellectual refinement mixed with carnivalesque absurdity, captures much of the subversive virtue that we find employed by the Anglo-Irish troubadour.