Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

1. Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns), The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 20/04/2009

2. Prufrock and OtherObservations(1917) • “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (written between 1910-1911 and published for the first time in 1915 in the magazine Poetry). • In the whole collection the “subject” “sees” the world and is seen by it (continually modified / conditioned by his relation with the outside world) • No narrative development, although it contains the elements of a narrative. • Life cannot be reduced to plots

3. Themes • Elite, people, roads, harboursassetting • Alienatedhumanity: • 13         In the room the women come and go 14        Talking of Michelangelo. (repetitions, refrain) • Loneliness and lack of communication: • 70           Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets 71        And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes 72        Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?..

4. Communication • Itdoesnotmatterwhethertheyspeak or not: thereis a radicalunderminingof the circuitofcommunication: • 'That is not what I meant at all. 98          That is not it, at all.' J.A. Prufrock is subject and object at one and the same time, so he cannot be a character. Irony does not confer identity and does not save him: 131      Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

5. Characters are notdefined in psychologicalterms, or in a confessionalromantic mode; they are measured in relation with the outside world: city, street, day and night (especiallydawn and dusk). Tensionsubject / objectdevelopsalongtheselines: • A) mentaltopography / urbantopography • B) perceptionofspace and time / day and night • C) characterasmask / tea as a social ceremony

6. Serpieri • 1) “reality” depends on perception, the pointofviewof the “subject”; butthereis no hierarchicaldependence, not a privilegingof the subject. The subjectis “exposed” and appears in pieces. • Itisnot just a matterofbeingunableto express whatonehas inside, because the world wouldn’t understand, but a more radicalsenseofincommunicability, due to the lackof a privilegedperspective.

7. Prufrock is “you”, “I”, we, “a pair of ragged claws”, a prophet, Lazarus, Hamlet. • A split subject: • 82        Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter • Destined to grow old, but always-already old. • The use of “And” and parataxis. • Epigraph from Dante’s Inferno (Canto XXVII) (Guido da Montefeltro)

8. Public and private • Prufrock’s confession is possible only because, paradoxically, there is no audience as such. The audience becomes complicit; it is implicated (You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon frère!, The Waste Land from Baudelaire). • “Pro-nominal comedy”

9. Stephen Ullmann • 1) Anthropomorphic metaphors (Human – non human) • 2) Animal metaphors (non human-human) • 3) Transfer of sense from concrete to abstract and viceversa • 4) “synesthetic” metaphors (from one sense to another • In Prufrock, mostly 1) and 3)

10. Leo Salingar • The speaker is vague, but the images are distinct. • Reaching forward only to fall back (“Let us go…) • Rhyming couplets and irregular verse, fixity and flux (streets… retreats; hotels… shells) • Fixity and flux: hard, gritty objects vs fluctuating and evasive thoughts. • Hints of something permanent which Prufrock can dimly perceive but cannot grasp.