PRUFROCK CONTINUED, PROBABLY

KI It occurred to me that if I start a new essay while all elements are working, I might have less trouble opening the weblog the next time.  Besides, my time is running out (the battery charge) now, but I recently found among the detritus of my workspace the text of Prufrock that I was using a long while ago.  Speaking of a world of lies and deceptions, Prufrock fits in well and he is aware of his inability to be a hero in the classical sense of the word.  "No!  I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be...".  What a lovely poem, and we have the invisible or hidden author (T. S. Eliot); the central character whose thoughts we are reading "(Prufrock, frock, something one wears, perhaps, out in public; a social disguise?); then the third element, the meaning: Prufrock experiences insight into his real problem in our "modern" world which is his inability, unlike Hamlet, to act meaningfully in it, his inability to cross the dance floor and ask the girl to dance, so to speak; his inability to act with a woman for a real love relationship.   The meaning that emerges from the experience of the poem has to do with the reality of love over against the illusion of love, I think.  Prufrock experiences the reality of love at the end of the poem and "sings" a beautiful poetic lyric.  Love is real though Prufrock remains cut off from it.  The image or metaphor that carries that meaning is, of course, obviously, that which is present in the end though absent in the earlier images in the poem: water.  (Okay, not obviously.  And Hamlet acts significantly throughout the play; he just doesn't dash to the throne room and immediately kill the king.  Hamlet also struggles with the "overwhelming question," and articulates it clearly, unlike Prufrock.  "To be or not to be; that is the question.  Whether ''tis nobler in the mind...". And following.

To digress further, notice that in Hamlet we have a world where reality is objective; right and wrong are clear, but the social situation has gone to hell because almost all the characters are dishonest or disceptive and essentially self-centered, willing to surrender themselves  to the will of King Claudius.  Hamlet truly loves Ophelia, real romantic love, yet her father makes her behave deceitfully too, to the point that she cannot survive in such a social situation so that she actually loses her mind and destroys herself.  Her brother, noble Laertes, immediately loses his good character by sinking to the role of assasin without a hesitation, without even seeming to notice that the King is an evil man, a murderer, seducing him into the same dark depths.   

I used to have a colleague who could not accept my reading of the poem, so some of her students reported to me.  Unfortunately we never discussed the poem, though there are various critical interpretations that are not like my reading and that do not see this journey through Prufrock's mind as a unified action. 

In any case, between the dots, Prufrock is considering how to begin a meeting with the woman.  He has though only "the weather," so to speak, to talk about, that is, his experience getting to the house and the room.  "Shall I say...".  Hamlet, haunted by the heroic character of his father, immediately forms a plan of action, the antic disposition.  Prufrock, on the other hand, says nothing.  The problem with refusing to face the question in the beginning is that he really has nothing, in every sense of the word, to offer here, and he is afraid of being turned down, a humiliating experience, as we all know.  So he says nothing.

I remember a Junior High School dance where we young men were in one group on one side of the gym, while the young ladies were in a group on the other side.  I really liked one of the girls there, but to dance with her I would have to cross all that open space and ask her in front of all her friends.  The guys knew of my infatuation and they egged me on.  I was scared, a bit;  at that age our social situations were risky and intense.  What if I cross that space, ask her in front of all those other girls, and she says "no!"   So, I remember screwing my courage to the sticking place, so to speak, and walking the walk.  Fortunately she did not say "no," and saved my public persona.  In other words, we danced and it was good.

The moment passes; Prufrock does not reach out to her, and the next two stanzas are Prufrock experiencing the consequences of his "great" refusal, his lack of "strength to force the moment to its crisis." 

[having gotten the exploration of Prufrock's interior dialogue going again, I shall stop and retire to my bed before I pick up the experience again, explore the consequences of his behavior, from the image of the afternoon and evening, through a new set of questions, three stanzas where the social and ontological crisis become clearly defined, then look at Prufrock's insight into who and what he really is, through the lovely lyric outburst that ends the poem.  "I grow old...I grow old...".

Until then.... 

Back again.  I have the devil of a time getting the text open, and I should be in bed, according to my wife, but suddenly I would rather write about Prufrock.  Prufrock missed the opportunity to act meaningfully and, as I said above somewhere, now he must face the consequences.  I think one of the reasons I put off finding my text was that I am not certain that I clearly understand these next stanzas.  The poem begins with the evening associated with the sleeping patient.  Patient suggests that we have a certain kind of existential illness: the inability to see real meaning in life and thus the inability to act meaningfully.  If love is not a reality in this world, how can we truly love anyone?  Of course we cannot, unless of course there is something wrong with our vision, our understanding, something wrong with the way we perceive the world.  That deficient seeing is the "I's" problem, or to say it a bit differently, the eye's problem. 

Now we find ourselves in a world where reality is only what you believe.  If you believe you are a woman even though biologically you were born a male, female is what is true for you and that is all that matters, and all of reality is like that, truth being only what you determine it is, and now we have Donald J. Trump for our president and a world where families are being ripped apart all at the service of one massive ego.  The "dissociated sensibility" that plagued western civilization started in the Renaissance.  Look at the evil characters in King Lear, for example, Goneril and Regan and Edmund.  They understand objective value but reject it at the service of their egos.  They desire wealth and power and believe that a commitment to objective value is foolish and gains you nothing.  

By the twentieth century there is no objective value to see any more.  Those values such as unconditional love, honor, truth, faith, etc. are simply illusions and the world is essentially meaningless, an existential wasteland, inhabited only by "hollow men." That is the "reality" that Prufrock inherits;  or I should say that is the reality as his I/eye understands it.  His "you" however still has the desire to love and be loved, but if the "I" sees love as an illusion, there is nothing one can do, really.  Or is there?  "Lips that would kiss form prayers to broken stone."  What Prufrock is on the verge of discovering is that reality is what it is regardless of what we think about it.  If love is truly real, it is real regardless of our inability to see it.  Prufrock's metaphysical blindness, imaged throughout the first part of the poem, is the illusion.  Commercial: read Dante.  Dante's entire work is a testament to the reality of love "that moves the sun and other stars."  If love is not real, obviously there is only sex.  But Prufrock is coming to understand that his so-called intellectual sickness may be, after all, simply "malingering."  

Hamlet wears a sword and is quick to use it, goodbye Rosenstern and Guildencrantz, whoever, goodbye Polonius, goodbye Uncle Claudius.  Prufrock wears a "necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--". There is an action, there is a different world, and yet love is a reality in both worlds in spite of Hamlet's inability to sort it out with Ophelia or Prufrock's inability to see that he just might be loveable after all, in this new world of the wasteland.   Perhaps he has been only pretending to be sick in a certain way to avoid the very real risk of rejection, humiliation, and heartbreak.