by Ines Cireddu
In The Love Song of J.A.Prufrock, T.S.Eliot makes a collage of images ranging
from an outdoor landscape of a city to an indoor party room, from biblical to
literary images, the very first one being an epigraph in Italian from Dante’s
Divina Comedia.
Eliot’s choice of it as the starting point for his poem mirrors his question
whether an artist can talk of his art to other people, without risking of being
misunderstood.
The opening line “Let us go then, you and I” seems to be an invitation to set
out on a journey which will bring him, the artist, to face the impossibility of
coping with matter –of- fact reality. As Guido da Montefeltro who has
surpassed earthly dimension accepts to unveil his self to Dante who shares the
same dimension, so Prufrock, who is Eliot’s persona, identifies himself with the
figure of the artist and starts to disclose his innermost soul to his alter ego or to
an imaginary reader willing to partake of the same experience.
The conjunction “then” establishes a powerful link with the epigraph and
testifies the acknowledgement of this identity.
Being this trip a mental one, space and time are both dilated and compressed :
Prufrock, pans from ‘half deserted streets’ to a room where ‘women come and
go talking of Michelangelo’ ,but I don’t think Prufrock ever went inside that
room physically, he just wanted to point out how art actually becomes a trivial
topic of conversation as any other, just a means of avoiding boredom and
showing off culture at a party. He knows each one has a different frame of
mind that can’t be communicated. Einstein’s theory of relativity and Freud’s
discovery of the unconscious made it quite clear at the beginning of the XXth
century and the first world war broke those certainties which had pivoted
man’s life in the past centuries.
Space and time become liquid , they flow through Prufrock’s mind, overlap,
lose precise contours, building fragmented images as in a cubist painting
which you can look at from different sides getting a simultaneous view or
images where objects are charged with evocative power as in a surrealist
painting which you can feel disquieting at first.
“The evening… spread out against the sky like a patient etherized upon a table
” sets the time of the poem and provides by this simile an effective image of
twilight,
of being halfway between the two dimensions that split Prufrock: the earthly
one which stands for ordinary reality and the beyond of the mind, that is the
creative process which belongs to the artist. Prufrock seems to point out the
importance of this lapse of day between the dying sun and the new born moon,
the “violet hour” – as T.S.Eliot calls it in the Waste Land , when seers as
“Tiresias, though blind, can see”. It appears to him the right time to be
etherized, to enter a coma state where we ‘die’ to outward reality and, in this
way, free our imagination to get in touch with the most unusual and uneasiest
places of our mind .
Prufrock chooses to lead his mate through ‘half deserted streets to “one
night cheap hotels and ‘sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells’, but, these
streets and those places, as the same Eliot seem to make explicit by the use of a
colon, are immaterial: they are the streets of the mind which’ follow like a
tedious argument” and, Prufrock knows, they lead insidiously to ‘an
overwhelming question ” that is no use uttering – Prufrock urges – maybe it is
not worth it or maybe not now. He insists they go and make their ‘visit’.
As if on a screen or in a vision there appear “women” that “come and go
talking of Michelangelo”.
Through flash backs, in a multi -layered stream of consciousness mode
monologue Prufrock shifts backwards and forwards, telling us about ‘the
yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window- panes and ‘licked its tongue
into the corners of the evening’ and how, paraphrasing his condition of being
both a contemplative and a casuist sort of man who is afraid of taking any
responsibility in everyday life by a metaphor which effectively describes him as
a cat, ‘seeing it was a soft October night, curled once about the house, and fell
asleep.’ Here we see Prufrock in his most primitive animal essence and even
his name seems to enclose him in a curl by the initial and the final voiceless
consonants ‘p’ and k’ respectively, which make the expression, the action, the
communication, difficult to come through- being the bilabial occlusive ‘p’
sound like a sort of locked door which opens violently or abruptly but is
soon closed again by the velar ‘k’. The sequence of vibrant ‘r’ sounds followed
by two back vowels –the ‘u’ which pushes forward and the open ‘o’ which
retreats and, split by the fricative voiceless ‘f sound , lock sufferance and pain
and the inability to overcome them. The name Prufrock becomes thus a
metaphor for himself and for the modern artist who sings his song unveiling
his self in an interior monologue which is also a plea for love and compassion.
Prufrock feels inadequate for everyday reality, he is full of doubts, insecure, he
fears even to prepare himself for “a face to meet” and wonders if he will ever
“dare disturb the universe ”; he justifies his put-offs repeating as a refrain ,
“there will be time , there will be time”, - a phrase, this, which seems to echo
mockingly the Ecclesiastes, where time, on the contrary , is associated to
important and crucial cycles of life as growth and death.
Prufrock seems to know everything about people and reality around him –“I
have known them all already, known them all”- he says, but this knowledge
doesn’t change him, doesn’t help to come to terms with them; he does not have
the strength to bite off “the matter with a smile” and to “squeeze the universe
into a ball” as Marvell suggested, nor , even if he feels his head disjointed from
his body thinks of being “a prophet” and have great things to say as John the
Baptist. He believes communication is not possible , “it is impossible to say
just what I mean ! he cries hardly impatiently – He feels it is not worth it
proposing himself when someone might then answer “that is not what I mean
at all, that is not it, at all”. Prufrock does not have the spur to “to take arms
against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them”, he does not feel a
Hamlet, nor a hero, but rather “an attendant lord … deferential, glad to be of
use, politic, cautious, and meticulous” – he has “measured out” his life “with
coffee spoons”-he confesses to his imaginary companion in his journey along
the city; besides he also feels “ridiculous”. He feels divided, torn apart, worried
of getting old but also wondering whether he “shall part” his “hair behind”,
trying a new hair style , or whether he shall eat a peach – he seems to hint at
signs of change in his life, but Prufrock always half –attempts and enveloped
by the twilight, after having seen the mermaids and heard them sing “in the
chambers of the sea” – though not for him- he well presumes , he’s no Ulysses
who has passed through ordeals without ever dismissing his final goal of
reaching Ithaca – seems to dissolve together with his companion when
“human voices “ bring them to reality.
The rather “unpoetic” words, the juxtaposition of images highly evocative of a
mood or an emotion, the colloquial tone Eliot uses from the very first lines
throughout the poem make it quite revolutionary and a real breakthrough in
modern poetry.
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