T.S. Eliot, and modern man's tragic paralysis
Reflections on the 1915 Modernist classic, 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock'
J. Alfred Prufrock walks the streets somewhere between a real and psychic metropolis in 1915. It is two years after the Ford company’s world-first assembly line was made operational in Detroit. Walter & Meyer’s ghastly Fagus factory is completed in Lower Saxony a year prior. Picasso is in his ascendency, mid-synthetic cubist phase, tearing life apart, purportedly to better represent it. A short while later, Arnold Schoenberg murders music in order to save it, creating his 12-tone system alongside his disciples in the second Viennese School. And, there is that other shadow of death and discombobulation - the great war.
So T.S. Eliot’s pathetic man is born to a world that deserves him. He is choked with indecision as the city chokes with smog. The smog, we know, is sinister, because it is both yellow and feline. Yellow is noxious. Cats are deceptive. We have no choice but to watch as it licks, swirls and seduces, stalking the night. It clouds the physical world, but the pollution is also spiritual. The soul is simultaneously enchanted and eviscerated;
The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
The yellow smoke that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap…. (15-20)
The great French Mystic and Philosopher, Simone Weill, has written brilliantly on the destructive forces of social and spiritual psychosis induced by late-stage industrialisation. In Human Personality she wrote, “A modern factory reaches perhaps almost the limit of horror. Everybody in it is constantly harassed and kept on edge by the interference of extraneous wills while the soul is left in cold and desolate misery. What man needs is silence and warmth; what he is given is an icy pandemonium”
Weill rips off the veil which conceals the post-industrial zeitgeist from conscious public reconciliation. Prufrock is indivorcible from this zeitgeist.
The contemporary reader must understand that whilst J. Alfred himself is not a sufferer in the physical factory, his soul is equivalently subjugated. He and his contemporaries live as the historic first of a new breed of man. He is anonymous, a blandoid functionary cast in a tidy fleet of company men. He is probably from London, but he could also be from New York, Frankfurt, Paris, or any modern city. That is the problem. Place does not feature as a constitutive part of person in the realm of modernity. The old order is dead, but her men must still walk the earth, gralloched of their sacred inheritance. Faceless and fettered, Prufrock’s screaming soul is trapped in a body indentured to a world that has destroyed community and desecrated its values. He must make a belated reckoning with the fact that working life is working life, whether the factory is assembling motor cars or life-insurance schemes. Prufrock’s distress is psychological, and all the more palpable because surely, modernity promised that it shouldn’t have to be this way.
Tinder for literary anti-heroes?
Perhaps a dating app would have saved J. Alfred Prufrock. Perhaps not, but the prospect is tantalising. More realistic though, is the notion that today’s technology has only formalised and perpetuated the Prufrockian frustration in dealing with romantic and erotic failure. A dating app wouldn’t have helped Prufrock because dating apps are mere extensions of the articles of paralysis that corrupt J. Alfred’s telos.
In the first instance, Prufrock objectifies a woman he doesn’t know, cockishly relating her physical form in terms he doesn’t command with any real authority;
And I have known the arms already, known them all-
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare (62-63)
Swipe-swipe-swipe; ‘Oh she’s nice, but I know her type!’
He fantasises about the sheer loveliness of the one he might win over. He is bizarrely familiar with both her and the romantic scenario in which they are bonded. It is as if he’s been watching - confident of his prowess, but in reality disconnected - from a distance for so long;
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl. (64-67)
Swipe, Stop, stare, ponder. The romantic excitement and cool detachment that co-habitats in the psyches of today’s troubled male classes is well-realised by Eliot, a century prior.
There is the avoidance, the sad and persistent questioning, self-talk and post-factum rationalisation, ending in the retrospective triumph of the inner monologue over the outer course of action;
And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets.
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor-
And this, and so much more?- (99-103)
Swipe. Stop, Delete app; ‘Dating is stupid…a waste of my time…’
And of course, there is the creeping shame of it all, the realisation built through both hard experience and self-induced psychosis that here stands a man not capable of functioning socially, emotionally, erotically, in the world he inhabits. Humiliated into sub-humanhood, he retreats, literally, into his shell, adopting crustacean form in order to scuttle away from the prospect of really living. Here is his seminal problem of avoidance. He will not be seen, whether he is rising to triumph or falling to defeat ;
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (73-74)
To Act, or not to act. That was never the question…
Prufrock is not going to do anything about his predicament. This is not a poem that canvasses the real possibility of transformation, redemption or personal victory. It may appear that way in fleeting moments, but Eliot’s literary derailments are several and severe. They ensure that J. Alfred Prufrock never really leaves the mire of his own paralysis. He tells us as much, in his invocation of Hamlet;
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do (111-112)
On the subject of this paralysis, we must also deal with the poem’s epigraph. It consists of 6 lines from canto 27 of Dante Aligheri’s Inferno. Before we even reach Eliot’s original text, the reader is bathed in the fatalistic hue of the eighth circle of Dante’s hell. Though the full significance of Dante’s presence requires much deeper investigation and analysis, the epigraph’s basic textual contents are instructive in forming some core judgments about Eliot’s poem. The words of Guido da Montefeltro, as relayed in the epigraph, allude to the inescapability of a dark, and deserved fate. It is important to note this does not necessarily point to Eliot drawing an equivalence between the character of Prufrock himself and Dante’s vision of the Earth’s most damned souls. However, readers must conclude that this poem will not offer its subject a pathway to salvation;
S’io credesse che mia riposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse (Epigraph: 1 - 3, original Italian)
If I thought that my reply would be to someone
who would ever return to earth
this flame would remain without further movement (Epigraph: 1-3, translated)
Next there is the textual repetition that immediately betrays the promise of action, in lieu of the reality of Prufrock’s staticity.
‘Let us go’, speaks Prufrock in his inner monolog as the poem commences. But by the end of the first stanza he’s fully repeated those same three words three times over! Where exactly is he going? Would a worthy man with a worthy story disgrace himself by begging three times in a call to intimate conversation? Once is a request, twice is a plea, thrice is a devastating exposition of the fact that Prufrock is too indecisive a fellow to be going anywhere at all.
Notwithstanding the peculiarly fluid recitation of the smog cat’s entrance in stanza three, our man is soon at it again. In Stanza 4 his self-talk begins to crescendo along with the silent panic the reader feels rising. ‘There will be time’, Prufrock lies to himself, a paralytic seven times over.
Eliot continues the pattern: In stanza five it is ‘Do I dare?’, recited three times. Stanzas six, seven and eight then provide eight futile assurances that Prufrock ‘knows’ it all - the implication being he needn’t take action, on account of his supposed prior accomplishments. Again, only the man who is not the man would find such a statement a necessity.
In Stanzas Twelve and Thirteen, Eliot deploys his most depressing use of repetition yet, with the ‘would it have been worth it’ lines. These expose Prufrock’s retrospective lament, despairing at his failure to act. As human beings we are prone to believe in the doing, not the telling. Explanation and pontification highlight man’s enfeeblement, when unallied to demonstrated action. Eliot exploits this instinct to great effect, in his use of repetitive language as a means to elevating the spectre of Prufrock’s wretched pathos.
The damned and the enjambed
T.S Eliot used poetic enjambment extensively in his works, and does so to great effect in ‘Prufrock’. There are a number of ways in which enjambment may affect a poem’s balance, however the primary effect on this text is to discomfit the reader, aggravating the sense of isolation and alienation. We may contrast this with Eliot’s 1922 masterpiece, The Waste Land, where the use of enjambment generally enhances the lyric flow of the line, infusing the text with a greater loft and syntactic carry. In ‘Prufrock’ though, Meanings are deferred and disconnected in the reader’s scan, pushing feelings of place and personhood into a disjointed, uncomfortable consciousness. For example, Eliot’s setting of the dystopian cityscape is not allowed to fit comfortably within our preference for evenness in presentation. We are forced to hobble over the text on a partially smooth (Lines 6 and 7), partially rickety (lines 5, 8, 9 and 10) path to understanding, heightening the dissociatiated melee in which Prufrock must tell his tale;
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question… (5-10)
Lovesong or Lovesick?
A song, and especially a love song, must by necessity have a unity of purpose, and a simplicity of message. Songs may deal with complex problems, and spectrums of emotions, but they must not present them in complex or as-yet-unsettled ways. Songs are simple dispatches which deal in the knowable. They must not change tone, tune, tempo or time too obsessively. But here we find that the formal structure of Eliot’s poem does do just such things. The contradiction that Eliot exploits is that The Loves Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is uncomfortably absent of a workable and consistent lyrical-emotional syntax. Whilst he may have conceived and composed his character’s song in both the United States and the United Kingdom, ‘Prufrock’ does not belong in the English hymnal, and would certainly not have made the cut in the later American songbook. J. Alfred is not knowable, not settled, and most certainly not emotionally accessible.
Herein lies the great meta-irony of Eliot’s creation. For The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is not a love song at all. It throws up more questions than it answers. It has a multitude of implicit tempo changes. It is written in free verse, but it’s subject is static with anxiety. There are windows of perfect iambic pentameter, and pockets of cruelly-cut lines. It rhymes, but not too much; certainly, never enough to allow the reader’s heart to free itself from the weight of empathetic angst. It frustrates when a song must satisfy.
A thoroughly modern man
Somewhat despairingly (and returning to Dante) we cannot have any confidence that the love song’s protagonist will find release and redemption in his struggles. At best, we can begrudgingly admit that he perhaps once had the stomach to start the journey. And that is what makes him just the man for his times; Like the factory drones and company men of Ford, he stands as the unfortunate product of the early 20th Century industrial complex. Like Walter & Meyer, he constructs a grand edifice to the banality of corporate life. Like Picasso, he assembles for us a fragmented vision of humanity. Like Schoenberg, he subjects that humanity to persistent, tortured un-reason, sensual deprivation and retrospective self-justification. Like Kaiser Wilhelm, he is the generative source of his own great war, but observes in paralysis from the sidelines as the action subsumes him and the citadel falls. His battle may be within, but he is equally impotent in the destructive adventure of his own instigation.
Full Text: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (The Poetry Foundation)