There's Something About J. Alfred Prufrock:

[x_los]

My 3am response to why I hate Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock got too big for one comment, so I figured it was too big NOT TO SHARE WITH THE WORLD!!

From comments to this excellent fic (http://halfpenny-green.livejournal.com/6952.html?view=25128#t25128), for context:

Thing 1: Let's be fair. A lot of my loathing is because I went to Iowa--which explains a lot, really. The undergrad population as a whole tended to have come at least partially because they were attracted by the prospect of affiliation with the Iowa Writer's Workshop because of it's rep. I was in the pilot year of the undergrad extension for the Workshop, so this was /especially/ true of everyone I knew and hung around with. That led to a LOT of literary pretension.

American students tend to have major embarrassing hard-ons for: Kerouac's On the Road, the Catcher in the Rye, Ginsberg--to a lesser extent, Sallinger and Nine fucking Stories, to a greater extent, Vonnegut--practically the school's patron saint, whose house you drift by with moony reverence--and bloody Prufrock. There in an inverse relationship between the amount of my fellow students' jizz I have to scrape off any given literary work and my ability to appreciate it. I came out almost wanting Vonnegut to slip on ice nine. I'll admit I'm unfairly biased against works with ludicrously inflated reputations, the sort which no work of art, stripped of the cultural prestige assigned to it, could support the burden of. I have snippets of the fucker memorized; I never /wanted/ or /tried/ to.

A girl--a FRIEND, even--in a workshop described a girl character as looking 'like a Prufrock mermaid,' and I had to spend a solid ten minutes trying to wring out of her what, if any, weight and significance she'd wanted that description to have, only to, in the end, have it collapse into shoddy, masturbatory name-dropping. In YOUR story, the poem's used quite purposefully, wielded with deliberate effect, and entirely meet and proper. That's different.

Thing 2: People sometimes give preference in teaching, personal favor, etc. to Lovesong rather than the Wastelend. I believe the later work is better, and that people teach Lovesong because it's shorter and somewhat readier to hand re: not having to simultaneously teach historical context (which you'd def. have to do in America, possibly not here, where the conflict in question is more a part of immediate cultural reference), which those strict close reading bastards just haaate doing. Teaching informs the canon, and it's what's taught that gets valorized and immortalized. I'd rather the work we pass on as an exemplar of this particular poet and his period be the Wasteland, which I prefer.

Thing 3: Lovesong is...kind of everything I dislike about this era of poetry. Contemporary critics dismissed the confessionalists as whiny bitches and dubbed Eliot's Prufrock art with too great an alacrity for me not be feel the juxtaposition of their receptions a bit bitterly, when the difference in approach to similar subject matter is actually slight.

The narrator is unsympathetic and unengaging (ahaha)--ambivalent, passionless, without the heart of Prousts' somewhat similarly ambivalent, contemplative narrator (bearing in mind I've not at all finished that series, so my judgment could evolve?).

The central problem is that masculine preoccupation with the avenues shut off by making a decision, that fear of emasculating rejection, a doubt that oneself is knowable, definable, expressible, or able to be committed to something so definite and permanent as the union Prufrock contemplates. It seems insubstantial, a bit pathetic and callow given his lack of acuity regarding the woman's position. Not only does he not love her desperately enough to ask, or have the courage to take action, he seems entirely unaware of her circumstances.

He's afraid of closing doors: what doors were ever open to the woman of that class in the Edwardian era, who sits in a room waiting to be selected? When will she see

"restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent"?

He fear of aging is another face of this fear of decision, and consequently lost opportunity. Aging is so much less an abject terror for him than for her, whose only currency is beauty/youth/fertility, and who he is leaving behind after having led her on for who knows how long. He's afraid emasculating rejection will curtail his power, his status, without realizing she cannot be similarly emasculated by his rejecting her/not asking her because her position was never so privileged as his, to be the chooser, the asker. He gives no thought at all to her feelings, her future as a result of his decision, positive or negative. And it doesn't feel, to me, like Eliot going beyond setting up a dislikable character as the poem's protagonist and adding that layer of irony, it feels like Eliot, prince of modernism, wants us to be genuinely interested in the predicament of this man, this exemplar of the uncertainty of modernity.

All through the poem there's a creeping misogyny that seems authorial. The parlor is established as a sinister/pointless sphere of female control of speech. In the room women come and go, talking of Michalangelo-- their blather silly, what do they know of that hyper-masculine Renaissance Man (whose women were muscles and meat and men in drapes)? The speech of women on something important is just cocktail chatter. The allusion to Salome ("Though I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon a platter, / I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;" slides neatly in. The mermaids are singing him to death like sirens--monstrous femininity trope.

I'm not making a purely feminist argument against it--it would be a mistake not to allow the piece the attitudes of its period. But chauvinism aside, it IS about that fundamentally masculine "I am not Prince Hamlet" crisis of selfhood. It's not written for me; it belongs to the boys as Dunharrow to the dead. It's /expertly/ crafted--Eliot is a perfect stylist--but it's an perfect scholastic argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin--admirable, fussy, ignorant of anything less exclusive/alienating and more meaningful.

...though I do like "When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;" for that neat, subtle little sky/ether/aether connection.

Comments

[prettyarbitrary.livejournal.com]

My impression of Prufrock is of a pathetic, shallow middle-aged man-child who's likely to die alone because he doesn't know how to care about anything but what people think of him. I read it, thought that, and decided that while it was an interesting exercise in portraying the sad hollowness of the bourgeoisie, it really wasn't very deep. It gave me the same feeling as The Great Gatsby, which...great American novel, my ass. I mean, I suppose, if you've got a very cynical view of America (and fair enough, many do).

Hah! I love watching people try to close read Eliot's work. Like appreciating German philosophy and speculating on the physics of Doctor Who, it's one of those things best done when you're hanging out with your lit-geek friends on a 3 am bender after marathoning your favorite sci-fi show into an altered state of consciousness.

[x-losfic.livejournal.com]

I think that's fair re: interesting portrayal/ not v. goodtimes in and of itself.

[blackletter]

*cheers*

Regarding thing 1:

That led to a LOT of literary pretension.

My BFF is in a creative writing PhD program, and although she does some awesome stuff, from the gossip I hear it seems that the pretension of members of that academic field is extraordinarily high. (Not that classics is void of pretension, far from it, but classicists don't think that people who don't know or appreciate what we read are uncultured morons. Instead we think that only a rare, select few are special enough to know and appreciate what we read, therefore it is only natural that not many people are familiar with our core texts. It's a totally different sort of pretension. We're more like the snobby and elitist aristocracy (sans power), and less like the high school social bully passing judgment on everyone else's taste in clothes/music/etc.)

My BFF and I made a pact to never take academia seriously, or else we fear it would destroy our souls.

Regarding thing 3:

It's been a *long* time since I read any Eliot, not since I was an undergrad, but I still think that this is a fascinating bit of analysis. Certainly, when I read Prufrock I never thought about gender implications or...much of anything, to be honest. (I remember it merely as a blur of interesting phrases.)

[x-losfic.livejournal.com]

It DOES do the Interesting Phrases bit well, though! I mean Elliot--good stylist.

[blinkidybah.livejournal.com]

Prufrock makes me want to stab myself in the EYES. So that I never have to read it again. Ugh. It's 90% hype, like all popular yet shitty things.

I do like Ginsberg tho :( Lawls so pretentious~~~

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Except that poem about bdsmsex. Thanks, Ginsberg, I totes wanted that image...

[meaning-full.livejournal.com]

I can agree with all of your points except, as usual, Thing 1. At a certain point, doesn't someone dispising something soley for its hype start to make that person pretentious themselves? I mean, if you're just interested in liking thigs that no one else has heard of, that's a little unfair to the genuinely well-crafted works that happen to still exist in the spotlight. I mean, yeah, every college kid on the planet has probably masturbated to a Decemberists album-- but does that make the music any less intelligent or well-structured? Everyone's favorite episode of New Who is usually Blink, but there's a reason for that, isn't there? I can understand having an uncontrollable sort of knee-jerk response of negativity toward overblown hype (I mean, Jesus, I didn't see The Sound of Music till I was in college), but I don't think that response warrants a valid argumentative point.

[x-losfic.livejournal.com]

I don't think I despise for the hype--things exist in a cultural context, always, and that influences how we read them. Unfair, maybe, but there is no 'fair', and there is no 'set meaning of a work'--just a coagulation of different perceptions, existing without any real definite Meaning, per se. And The point isn't that it IS bad BECAUSE it's popular, just that you can find something to be less good than its normally credited to be, and thus something of a disappointment, or undeserving of its popularity. And the INCREDIBLE POPULARITY of a poem /does/ kind of erode the Things Which Makes Poems Work--the language being fresh, unusual and thought provoking rather than clichéd. Too-successful poetry erodes itself over time by becoming too much a PART of English--look at Blake, or how make Shakespeare phrases are now just part of language, taken for granted, rather than STARTLING and poetically effective. Popularity is just part of a piece's context, and can't be divorced from its reading.

[meaning-full.livejournal.com]

Hmm. That's a good point. You're right about cliche being dangerous for poetry-- it is one of the things that are almost unforgivable, and yet can be difficult to avoid. You're also totally right about how once a work is out there in the world, it doesn't really exist anymore as a separate work which can ever be viewed without the context of everyone's perceptions of it. Maybe that's unfair-- maybe in an idealized reality we would be able to view these things in a vacuum as if we were seeing them for the first time-- but for a talking, thinking member of a living culture, that's pretty much impossible. I think it's also true that, while sometimes troublesome,the phenomenon of cultural perceptions regarding anything substantive is a completely valid and totally interesting one. I was actually talking about this the other day with my students as we were wrapping up Frankenstein. They, of course, keep accidentally calling the monster "Frankenstein" and I was trying to explain that all of our perceptions about that creature can be traced back to the movies. So, even the most well-read individual has this image of the monster being green with a bad flat-top hair cut and neck bolts. Even now, when I read the book, even though I know how Shelley wrote him and I appreciate it, I still can't completely divorce myself from that other image. And maybe, in some weird, timey-wimyey way, future takes on dated subjects does irreversibly affect current readings of the original.

[vonquixote.livejournal.com]

I've been meaning to reply to this for bloody ages, you know. Since you posted it, in fact. I didn't want to come back at it with either the instinctive "I agree with much of what you say but like it anyway, sometimes for reasons which you acknowledge" or, far worse, the agree-to-disagree "fair enough", or something that one or both of us could misconstrue as a defence of 'Prufrock'. Since I seem to have woken up two hours before I need to today, though:

Thing 1: the people I studied with as an undergrad had a similar issue with Vernon God Little, anything at all by Chuck Pahlaniuk or Hunter S. Thompson... and I'm sure the list goes on, but I stopped paying attention somewhere roundabout Pahlaniuk and have had an obnoxious literary hard-on for Hunter S. since long before going to university. As a postgrad, it was theorists. I still weep at the memory of MA seminars that devolved into playing out the Foucault vs. Derrida cage-fight (actually, I wish that had been a cage-fight, it might have been over with more haste) again and again, to the point where I prayed for strict close reading rather than this very clever argument that made reading and analysis obsolete. So yes, I understand that you hate the fans of 'Prufrock' as much as the poem, and understand why. Also, YES to the memorising part. I never tried to memorise 'do I dare...' &c., but I do like it as a portrayal of chronic indecision and I'm glad it's in there.

Thing 2: Speaking as one who teaches Eliot, and has in fact recently taught on Eliot to a group of eighteen-year-olds: trust me, we still have to teach context in England. Some - not all, but some - of our students have trouble thinking of even the Second World War as anything more than a setting for films and computer games, and anything that happened before then barely registers on their cultural radar as anything other than an event, and a date - factoids rather than functioning contexts.

So 'The Waste Land' is still quite difficult to access, for its context and also because it's very much a poem of erudition. Even with excellent hypertext versions unpacking the references Eliot didn't footnote himself, actually understanding the impact and implications of those references is beyond the expected (by the education system, and by a British culture which likes erudition on the telly but doesn't necessarily want it drinking in the local pub) and, in many cases, actual abilities of my/our students.

Of course, I teach on 'The Waste Land' anyway, because damn me if I don't want my students to defy expectations, but we teach 'Prufrock' first because it's easier to work with - less erudite, certainly. It also has an immediate intertextual route through the concept of 'loneliness and isolation', shared by other texts on the syllabus. Given that we're still introducing our groups to the idea of intertextuality, every little helps. It also (sadly) fits better into expectations of narrative because it's about a character in a situation that they can recognise more readily, because of all those stories about men's fears and men's anxieties.

[vonquixote.livejournal.com]

Thing 3, then. I think I like 'Prufrock' for some (NOT ALL) of the reasons you dislike it for.

'Prufrock' and, indeed, Prufrock are, as you say, all about that fundamentally masculine crisis of selfhood. I have been tottering in and out of that crisis of selfhood since adolescence at least (and I don't remember much before then, other than near-daily panic attacks and a gallery of embarrassing moments), and so I think it's written for me in the way it isn't for you. It is a pathetic condition, but it's also the modern masculine condition and I don't think I blame Eliot for attempting to articulate it.

The problem with that masculine crisis of selfhood in the now is that it's a thing that it's socially easier than many for men to talk about, an arena in which male discourse doesn't automatically carry the weight of the oppressor upon the oppressed, in which we are not at risk of 'mansplaining' something which doesn't belong to us. Except, of course, that concentrating on and fussing about our Selves is a luxury of the oppressor, an avoidance of our responsibilities to confront the ways in which we oppress without trying, a kind of oppression by omission.

The determination to think about and talk about something other than oneself is what keeps me sane, but to think and talk about something other than oneself is problematic for a man: partly because we're socialised to do just that (like I'm doing now, in fact) but also because any man with a sense of social responsibility is wary of talking, wary of exercising an oppressive power he probably doesn't even know he has and, in many cases, never asked for.

If men don't speak about themselves, what can they speak about? The answer is 'not a lot, really' - and I'm not saying this for sympathy or to try and claim that Men Have It Hard, because that's nonsensical, but to explore a problem inherent to masculinity (because having it comparatively easy and having no problems whatsoever are worlds apart).

Nothing that I've just said mitigates the chauvinism of Prufrock and 'Prufrock', admittedly. The character is benighted, either unable or unwilling to consider his situation as anything other than his. As the centre of his own perceptual universe he lacks the belief that there are other real people in it, and that is shameful. I do agree that 'Prufrock' lacks the savage sense of irony that you expect from Eliot: like Conrad, who I teach on in the same context, Eliot displays too much of a prejudice too subtly for the claim of ironic detachment to truly stick. (I must share that idea with my students at some stage: thank you for it). The double-bind of exploring and escaping masculine analysis paralysis both being problematic is absent from the mind of Prufrock-the-character and possibly from Eliot himself, but 'Prufrock'-the-poem articulates the sense of paralysis that comes with awareness of paralysis remarkably well.

The poem is about someone I could turn into, who I see acquaintances and even friends turning into, and that's why I value it, as a way of saying 'there go we, lest we forget'. Better to disturb the universe and have to apologise occasionally than to sit on my paws in safety, say I, but that's what having eighty-odd years of discourse will do for you.

[x-los.livejournal.com]

Doing Spring Email Cleaning, and rereading this--a really GOOD analysis of this entire thing. Not in a 'now I love the poem' sense, but def. in a 'now I appreciate why you find it engaging, and that ABOUT it engages me also' way.