ALIENATION, MOURNING, AND MELANCHOLIA IN ELIOT’S “PRELUDES” AND “PRUFROCK”

Two of the most fundamental and universal issues of existence and ontology concern the relationships of individuals with their own Selves and those they have with other human beings. Upon entering a new and unprecedented age – an age of profound skepticism and cynicism – the modernists encountered challenges of a new front; with the façades and pretenses of the humanistic ideals of previous ages having fallen apart, there remained an anxiety of facing the emptiness of the human “Being”. There is a fear that humanity has become as cold and empty as the concrete buildings that surround it. The individual’s alienation from one’s Self and from human fellowship are themes that T.S. Eliot explores in “Preludes” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In “Preludes”, the speaker presents the people of his (or her) city to be unaware of their alienation from their sense of humanity. Being conscious of such an alienation, he, as an observer, is in turn depicted to be in a state of mourning. The speaker in “Prufrock”, to a more personal degree, is shown to be aware of his own alienation from the world, and such a self-awareness manifests itself through his state of melancholia.

Sigmund Freud’s work on Mourning and Melancholia (1917)[1] distinguishes for us the differences between the two terms. “Mourning,” Freud writes, “is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one.”[2] In melancholia, “one cannot see clearly what it is that has been lost, and it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either.”[3] “In mourning,” Freud puts in another way, “it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself.”[4] It appears, then, that mourning according to Freud is a condition whereby an individual is in a position of being inside looking out, and in melancholia the individual is outside looking in. The mourning subject is thus in a state of extrospection, and the melancholic subject in a state of introspection[5].

In the “Preludes”, we are presented with a speaker and his/her omniscient observations. The first two movements however do not immediately indicate the presence of an interactive speaker – a first-person narrator in particular – as they seem to be fragmentary descriptions of city life by a third-person, uninvolved narrator. In fact, it is not until the third movement that the pronoun “you” is mentioned, and the possibility of the Preludes being a dramatic monologue, when taken as a whole, comes into play. But the “I” that appears in IV.10 and the idea that the “I” is interacting with “these images” (IV.11) contextualise the previous passages. They become the speaker’s very observations of the city, its atmosphere, and its people.

And what does the speaker observe? He notes the presence of “burnt-out ends of smoky days” (I.4), “withered leaves” (I.7), “vacant lots” (I.8), “broken blinds” (I.10), and a “lonely cab-horse” (I.12). The adjectives attached to the speaker’s descriptions mark a sense of absence, decay, and isolation that pervades throughout the city. If we take the descriptions further as Symbolistic[6] imageries, they become indicative of the internal emptiness of the city’s inhabitants. Indeed, when the speaker begins to observe the “you” of the third movement, he/ she draws the readers (to whom “you” is possibly referring), and consequently the whole of humanity, into the city space and the poem’s artistic frame. What we have then is a totalising and omniscient observation of modern humanity by the poem’s speaker.

The modern human being here is alienated from its sense of humanity. We see a soul “trampled by insistent feet / At four and five and six o’clock” (IV.3-4), unnoticed by people during the business of rush hours. The human Soul, far from being sublime, is “constituted” by a “thousand sordid images” (III.5,4). The only feeling beings are the personifications of evening and morning in the first and second movements. Termed by Montgomery as “collectives”[7], the entities of evening and morning are the only ones conscious of the sceneries in the respective movements, collecting “the small world of each consciousness.”[8] Such an observation of modern humanity’s condition draws the speaker into a state of mourning. He “clings” to “fancies that are curled around these images” (IV.10-11) – his observations – in an attempt to hold onto “the notion of some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing” (IV.12-13). This “thing” is the lost sense of humanity of the speaker’s community: the city for him has become “poor and empty”[9] – and so have its residents. The speaker is unable to redeem this lost and fragile “thing,” and thus ironically comforts himself with the idea that “the worlds revolve like ancient women / Gathering fuel in vacant lots” (IV.15-16). The courses of human actions are as vain and absurd as the attempts to gather fuel in empty spaces.

In “Prufrock,” the speaker is conscious of his own alienation from the world. Prufrock’s state of alienation is immediately set up in the poem through the epigraph from Guido da Montefeltro, wherein he implies that Dante will not be able to return to the human world. Juxtaposed into the poem, the epigraph subsequently reflects Prufrock’s own isolation from the human world. “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” (45-46)[10] Prufrock asks. Indeed, he is a character hesitant to impose the footprints of his essence – his actions – upon the universe. He frequently repeats the question “Do I dare?” and asks moreover with the same frequency, “How should I presume?” He opts to remain as an observer, unnoticed, as he is in “the room” where “women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (13-14). Prufrock adds that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas,” (73-74) marking his extreme displacement from human society. Here he is not only non-human (he is depicted through the synecdoche as something like a crab) but he is more importantly situated far away from the business of the modern city, scuttling unnoticeably in the still waters. He sees the “mermaids singing,” but they sing “each to each” (124). He understands his complete exclusion, and simply says, “I do not think that they will sing to me” (125). He settles on being one who merely observes them, seeing the mermaids “riding seaward on the waves” (126). Prufrock’s isolation and exclusion put him in the position of an unnoticed observer, but eventually he becomes seemingly comfortable with it.

Nevertheless, Prufrock’s alienation and isolation drive him into melancholia, a condition characterised by “an extraordinary diminution in his self-regard, an impoverishment of his ego on a grand scale”[11]. He knows that he is “no prophet” and such a fact is “no great matter” (83). He describes himself as a man of high class, possessing a “morning coat” (42) and a “necktie rich and modest” (43), but after having “seen the eternal Footman hold [his] coat, and snicker” (85) – an image of Death awaiting – is made afraid of Death’s insubordination; the illusion of security his class offers him no longer seems to him believable. Prufrock also admits that he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (111), but he quickly moves into further diminishing his status to “an attendant lord” (112) and eventually to “the Fool” (119). Ultimately all the walls that Prufrock raises to protect his ego break down, and all that is left is someone who, despite his sophistication, fails to break through the boundaries of the “formulated phrase,” and who, consequently, becomes himself formulated, paralyzed and unable to do anything about his isolation.

What we have then in “Preludes” and “Prufrock” are characters who deal, directly or indirectly, with alienation, but who ultimately are unable to do anything about it. They enter a state of mourning or melancholia, but their conditions prove to be paralyzing. Being in such dispositions, they position themselves to be mere observers of the alienation of others or the isolation of themselves. They deprive themselves of fruitful human interactions, but perhaps in invoking the readers in their use of the word “you,” they are seeking companionship with and, ultimately, empathy from the readers.

 

[1] Taken from The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volue XIV (1914-1916): On the History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement, Papers on Metapsychology and Other Works, 237-258.

[2] p.243

[3] p. 245

[4] p. 246

[5] And indeed, Freud remarks that “the disturbance of self-regard is absent in mourning” (p.244) as mourning does not concern the ego as much as melancholia.

[6] For a brief overview of the Symbolist movement, see Sam Phillips,. …isms: Understanding Modern Art. (New York: Universe Publishing, 2012), 18-19.

[7] Marion Montgomery, “Memory and Desire in Eliot’s ‘Preludes’ in South Atlantic Bulletin, Vol. 38, No. 2 (South Atlantic Modern Language Association, 1973), 63.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Freud, 246.

[10] All references to “Prufrock” taken from T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” in The Longman Anthology of British Literature, eds. David Damrosch and Kevin J.H. Dettmar (Pearson Education, Inc., 2010), 2287-2291.

[11] Freud, 246.

DUSK AND THE UNCANNY IN CONRAD’S HEART OF DARKNESS

The dichotomy of Light and Darkness is noticeably prevalent and all-encompassing in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, so much so that the symbolisms and meanings of this antithetical pair may seem at times to fall into ambiguity or to get muddled into complicated significations. Yet the novel remains comfortable with such a situation. Its themes thrive on ambivalence and a tone of seeming uncertainty. What at first glance appears to be a scene of incertitude for characters can turn out to be, after an uncovering of many complex layers, a moment of revelation, self-awareness, or existential understanding. In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the gulf between Light and Darkness – the gulf that harbours the uncanny, the gulf that represents Dusk – is depicted as a zone wherein Marlow experiences self-realisation and enlightenment.

There is in Heart of Darkness a gap in the dichotomy of Light and Darkness. This gap is magnified and made observable by the distinct contrast in the representative figures of Light and Darkness, and indeed they are portrayed to be almost archetypal. Kurtz is said to be “claimed” by “powers of darkness” (1989). The darkness embodied in Kurtz is universalised as Marlow describes the last moments of his life: “The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down towards the sea…and Kurtz’s life was running swiftly too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of inexorable time” (2003). The juxtaposition of these sentences parallels Kurtz’s heart with the “heart of darkness” that is found everywhere from the centre of the wilderness to which the phrase alludes, to the River Thames which it threatens to encompass. Kurtz’s position as a figure that embodies darkness is further solidified when he is described in his deathbed as not being able to see the “light…within a foot of his eyes” (2004). Indeed, his stare “could not see the flame of the candle, but was wide enough to embrace the whole universe, piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (2005). The irony of this description is in Kurtz’s inability to see light no matter how wide or universal his stare is. All he is able to see is darkness, and that darkness resides within him.

Inasmuch as Kurtz is unable to see the light, the Intended is ignorant of – if not unable to comprehend – the darkness in Kurtz. She is portrayed as an archetype of light and of what is beautiful, pure, and innocent. Marlow describes her thus: “She struck me as beautiful—I mean she had a beautiful expression. I know that the sunlight can be made to lie too, yet one felt that no manipulation of light and pose could have conveyed the delicate shade of truthfulness upon those features” (2007). She has “a pale head”, “fair hair”, a “pale visage”, and a “pure brow” (2007). All these fair and beautiful external features set her up in contrast with the darkness within Kurtz. However, her innocence, her “unextinguishable light of belief and love” (2008), is thought by Marlow to be incapable of understanding or bearing the reality of Kurtz’s darkness. He says that, for her, it would be “too dark altogether” (2010). He thus implies that there is a necessary separation between the dealings of Light and Darkness.

Following Marlow’s logic for separation, it would seem that the Darkness and Light that Kurtz and his Intended signify respectively have between them an unbridgeable gulf. And yet the novel complicates this distinction. Dusk, a time that rests between the bright and dark hours of the day, is depicted in the beginning of the novel with poignancy: “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men” (1955). It is in the light of this setting sun where the Nellie’s crew go through a contemplative and aesthetic experience: “We looked at the venerable stream not in the vivid flush of a short day that comes and departs for ever, but in the august light of abiding memories” (1955). It is also in the climate of this setting wherein Marlow’s narrative is unfolded: not in the brilliance of midday nor in the darkness of midnight, but in the dying light of dusk.

Dusk is the gulf between Light and Darkness, and this gulf may be equated to the realm of the uncanny, the realm of Freud’s Unheimlich. Indeed, insofar as Freud’s concept of the Unheimlich breaks down the binary boundaries between its own essence and that of the Heimlich, so does the concept and imagery of dusk break down the dichotomy of Light and Darkness. This area of the uncanny in the novel breaks down oppositions in such a way that there is certainty to be found in uncertainty and realisation in ambiguity. The gulf of the uncanny, the gap symbolised by dusk, is a dialectical realm wherein the ethos of Marlow’s character attains an understanding of its existence and that of the world and people around him. The culmination of Marlow’s experience, being a character situated symbolically in such a realm, is described by himself as such: “It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me—and into my thoughts. It was sombre enough too—and pitiful—not extraordinary in any way—not very clear either. No, not very clear. And yet it seemed to throw a kind of light” (1958). In his experiences are fragments of self-realisation, revelations, and understandings, not least of which is his understanding of Kurtz’s darkness and his Intended’s sparkle of sublimity. Marlow also explains to his fellow seamen that “it seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream…No, it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence” (1973). His contemplations and philosophies, unclear to himself at first, are constantly deconstructed and reconstructed in the course of his journey and his narrative.

Marlow is subsequently elevated into a state of enlightenment. He becomes representative of the individual who beholds the Truth and escapes the Platonic Cave, but who also consequently becomes alienated from his company. By the end of the novel he is said to have “ceased, and sat apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha” (2010). And indeed he has already recognised his isolation in the artistic frame when he states, “We live, as we dream—alone” (1973). Yet this alienation, this dream-like uncanny state of retrospection, allows Marlow to observe and understand the universal darkness while remaining apart from it. He thereby becomes the didactic Individual, a signifier of the Particular marked especially by his contrast with the nameless Others, his fellow seafarers, to whom he shares his profound reflections on Truth and the human soul. In this perspective he is not alone. His life, as in his dream-like narration, is recounted with company. Together, they journey through the river of experience and past memories, with the threat of the looming darkness making their quiet solidarity all the more poignant.

 

Bibliography:

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, ed.by K. J.H. Dettmar, Pearson Education, 2010. pp.1949-2010.

SUMMER READS FOR THE TOLKIEN ENTHUSIAST