Surrealism is a
dangerous word to use about the poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot, and
certainly with his first major work,
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ". Eliot wrote the poem,
after all, years before Andre Breton and his compatriots began defining and
practicing "surrealism" proper. Andre Breton published his first
"Manifesto of Surrealism" in 1924, seven years after Eliot's
publication of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock". It was this manifesto which defined the
movement in philosophical and psychological terms. Moreover, Eliot would later
show indifference, incomprehension and at times hostility toward surrealism and
its precursor Dada.
Eliot's favourites among his French
contemporaries weren't surrealists, but were rather the figures of St. John Perse and Paul Verlaine, among
others. This does not mean Eliot had
nothing in common with surrealist poetry, but the facts that both Eliot and the
Surrealists owed much to Charles Baudelaire's can perhaps best explain any
similarity "strangely evocative explorations of the symbolic suggestions
of objects and images." Its
unusual, sometimes startling juxtapositions often characterize surrealism, by
which it tries to transcend logic and habitual thinking, to reveal deeper
levels of meaning and of unconscious associations. Although scholars might not
classify Eliot as a Surrealist, the surreal landscape, defined as "an
attempt to express the workings of the subconscious mind by images without order,
as in a dream " is exemplified in
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."
"Prufrock presents a symbolic landscape
where the meaning emerges from the mutual interaction of the images, and that
meaning is enlarged by echoes, often heroic," of other writers.
The
juxtapositions mentioned earlier are
evident even at the poem's opening, which begins on a rather sombre note, with
a nightmarish passage from Dante's Inferno.
The main character, Guido de Montefeltro, confesses his sins to Dante,
assuming that "none has ever returned alive from this depth"; this
"depth" being Hell. As the
reader has never experienced death and the passage through the Underworld, he
must rely on his own imagination (and/or subconscious) to place a proper reference onto this cryptic
opening. Images of a landscape of fire
and brimstone come to mind as do images of the two characters sharing a
surprisingly casual conversation amid the chaos and the flame.
The nightmarish theme continues as the reader
explores the wet, cold and hostile streets of the city, a city which seems to
many readers to be on the verge of reality, without ever crossing the
line. The evening is "spread out
against the sky/ Like a patient etherized upon a table." With
the assumption that the etherised "patient" is asleep, though
not naturally and quite uncomfortably, the dream imagery and
"corrupted" sense of reality are again evident. Some critics believe
that Prufrock's inability to be a part of society is personified by this
"etherised patient." Like a scene from an apocalyptic film, the
streets are dark, dirty and half-deserted, leaving the reader to wonder why the
world is as is described by Prufrock.
The
reader begins the poem on a dark note but is suddenly thrown into a lyrical
couplet that presents a glaring juxtaposition of emotions: "In the room
the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo." From darkened streets to a high-class
function, the reader must notice the glaring contrast between the two
scenes. Which one represents the reality
of Prufrock's life?
No sooner than the reader witnesses some
cleanliness and civility, does Prufrock take us
back to the
horror and dream like (nightmare) of the world originally mentioned. The yellow fog which, according to Eliot, is
the factory smoke from St. Louis that blew across the Mississippi, is referred
as a type of beast, probably a cat. The
fog "rubs its back upon the windowpanes, "licks it's tongue"
"made a sudden leap and "Curled once about the house, and fell
asleep." The image of the cat is often used in surrealist, symbolist and
fantasy genres. In this poem, the reader
may remember the Cheshire Cat from Lewis Carroll's The Adventures of Alice in
Wonderland or Edgar A. Poe's short story "The Black Cat". In any case, what would normally be a very
real landscape is darkened, bastardized and animated by Prufrock's
descriptions. This un-real dark
landscape holds out (with the exception of the 'Michelangelo' chorus) until the
end, when Prufrock dreams (a dream within a dream?) of "mermaids singing, each to
each." Even though the Edenic,
paradisaical marine landscape is Prufrock's dream, he is still able to darken
it by refusing to succumb to its pleasures and choses (or feels compelled) to
return to the dark side: "Till human voices wake us, and we
drown." The mundane world draws him
back.
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
is not generally described as a surrealistic poem, but if the definition of
surrealism combines dreams, the un- or sub-consciousness' and symbolic meaning
through objects and imagery, the landscape of the poem may fit this
classification. The reader is taken on a
journey through the mind and the city of a lonely, bitter and ostracized man
named J. Alfred Prufrock. His emotional
and social states are reflected through the landscape of the city and the sky
above: dark, empty and smothering. Not all surrealistic works are dark like this
poem, but the timeless, paradoxical and juxtapositional are what makes
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" surrealistic.
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