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x_losMy 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.
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.
