Analysis of T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Eliot, The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock

Between the Familiar and the Uncanny

Literary modernism at the beginning of the twentieth century is considered to have emerged as a radical brake with tradition in the field of both artistic production and criticism. The brake with tradition presupposed, among other things, the novelty of ideas and technique, new artistic means of creation, a new perspective on authorship. All these however, were not used to fully reject tradition, but to alter and reincorporate tradition, as T.S. Eliot proposed in his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent:

One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it discovers the perverse.The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not actual emotions at all. " (Colleen, 34)

The modern artist's search for novelty is thus not a break with tradition in itself, there are no new emotions to be found, only new means of expression, new rhetorical devices, and especially the inclusion of common or " low " things, next to the "high" ones, to the extent that all kinds of experience can be considered literary experience. These features just mentioned are also among the most striking particularities of Eliot's poetry.

His works are filled with extensive citation and allusiveness to traditional sources, both literary and also mythological. Eliot's preoccupation with the past and tradition is called by literary critic Lamos Colleen, "paternal citation," and as the critic observes this feature of Eliot's poetry can be interpreted as part of the modernist " sexual and textual errancy," as the subtitle of the study by the aforesaid critic announces:

The authority of these textual monuments legitimates the work of the son who aspires to join the ranks of the fathers; moreover, it is the presence of the past that itself animates his work, for

ot only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously>." (Colleen, 71)

The "paternal citation" is in consonance with the Eliot's praise in favor of a certain type of objectivism and impersonality, and very high intellectualism:

The essay'stwo main propositions concern, first, the mutually adjusting relations between the individual poet or artist and an "ideal order" -- or canon -- of art (54); and secondly, the status and role of the poet's emotions and in the production of poetry. It culminates in the identification of (73), which is an aesthetic emotion paradoxically arising from poetic : (55)" (Goldman, 78)

Paradoxically, poetry is the result of a mixture between high intellectualism and elitism, with constant allusions to the greatest cultural texts, and on the other hand, common experience, part of the details of daily life, or the "yellow fog," as Eliot names this type of experience in his Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes [...]" (Eliot, 873)

It is thus the author's intention to show daily experience in the shape of "yellow fog," blurring one's vision through the window panes, that is common experience pushing the individual far away from the essence and truth.

Nevertheless, both of these are important to poetry, and true intellectual poetry has to contain this common experience, expressed in the appropriate manner:

The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is" and, through "a labour of the intelligence,... To attain that stage of vision, amor intellectualis Dei>(SW) " (Colleen, 38)

Literary critic Charles Ferrall observes that dissociation and, at the same time, union of intellectualism and the banal experience, corresponds to the sexual duality man- woman, the contact with women bringing the "social self" to life, whereas the man by himself is the intellectual self.

According to Ferrall, this duality intimates of very complex psychological aspects:

Prufrock's sudden regret that he 'should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas',22 or a primitive creature in a world prior to human occupation, nevertheless seizes on those parts of the crab which are used for nothing other than defense against other creatures. In other words, the familiar self is strange and consumed with violent or asocial fantasies whereas the primitive self which metamorphoses into various totemic animals can be also, paradoxically, socialized and even familiar. If the unfamiliar or unheimlich was once familiar or heimlich then it would also follow that the familiar or heimlich may once have been repressed or unheimlich." (Ferrall, 83)

The uncanny or "unheimlich" is a feature of Eliot's poetry which results from this duality and mixture of social life and asocial feeling and fantasies. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock is a very good example of these features of Eliot's poetry, and of the presence of the uncanny most of all.

Line after line, there are unpredictable alternations of details of normal life, interrupted by the rhetorical, intellectual questioning, or " overwhelming questions," in Eliot's phrase. The allusions to the Shakespearian tragedy Hamlet announce that the poem is concerned witbits own overwhelming questions, but in a very different manner. The major questions are still asked, but not the poet concludes that we can not "disturb the universe "with our inquieries:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

I am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous

Almost, at times, the Fool." (Eliot, 876)

The poet is "an easy tool," or maybe the "fool," but not Hamlet who asks for greats answers from the universe. For Eliot, the universe is a whole can not be reduced to these questionings, can not " be squeezed into a ball " and rolled " towards some overwhelming question" (Eliot, 875).

There is a permanent pendulation between these two states, the everyday life, and the time of everyday life which can be counted "in coffee spoons" and the ideal states, the Platonic world, the moments of cirses and truth:

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet -- and here's no great matter;" (Eliot, 875)

One of the most important symbol related to the primitive world is that of the sea, alluding perhaps, first of all, to ancient mythologies, and the sea -gods, but also to Shakespeare's Tempest. The sea imagery of the poem indicates first of all the moment of artistic creation through the song of the mermaids in the last part of the poem:

have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown." (Eliot, 876)

Hearing the mermaids singing each to each, but not to himself means that he had access to the mystery but not to its answer. The mystery remains hidden in the "chambers of the sea," but it can not be taken out and revealed. The mere "lingering" in the world of fantasy and dream is possible though.

Also, the "claws" the poet wants in order to scuttle the "floors of silent seas" (Eliot, 875), are opposed to the quiet life of the city, covered in smoke and yellow fog.