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.

WRITING AND EXISTENCE IN MARTIN AMIS’ MONEY

Martin Amis opens Money with the following inscription: “This is a suicide note. By the time you lay it aside…John Self will no longer exist. Or at any rate that’s the idea. You can never tell, though, with suicide notes, can you?” With such a statement, Amis immediately puts into perspective the idea of death – but it is an idea that is subsequently superimposed with doubt. “Will John Self die?” the reader may ask. Or to be more specific: “Will John Self cease to exist?” In a novel that contains John Self’s past-tense narrative of what to him is his ever-dynamic present, his neverending “now”, these are questions that the readers are supposed to keep in mind upon reading the beginning all the way to the novel’s ending. Indeed, Money, as a suicide note, depicts John Self’s retrospective attempt to establish, through the reader, an existence that will survive his future inexistence. The novel, in this light, captures the totality of John Self’s essence as he writes and narrates events of his life to the readers. Jean-Paul Sartre’s work, Why Write?, and Peter Brooks’ work on Freud’s Masterplot will help us further understand and explain John Self’s search for such an existence.

Brooks states that “ultimately…the passion that animates us as readers of narrative is the passion for (of) meaning”, which passion “appears to be finally a desire for the end” (1162). This end, for Brooks as it was for Freud, is death. It is the final stroke of death that gives completion and meaning to the life that precedes it. “All narration is obituary in that life acquires definable meaning only at, and through, death”, says Brooks, connecting literary narratives with life and death (1163). As such, literary narratives are rendered incomplete, fragmentary, and meaningless without their appointed endings. Brooks points out that beginnings “presuppose the end” (1163),  and readers, upon reading a narrative’s beginning, assume a desire for its end. Amis taps on this expectation of death and endings, and the meaning which these bear with them, when he marks Money as a suicide note and announces, however ambiguously, John Self’s future inexistence.

Money thus becomes what Sartre would call an “appeal” by the writer to his/ her readers. In the preface to Why Write, Richter explains: “We who know that the physical world we animate with our perceptions will go on darkly after we are gone must write to make something that will survive us” (660). According to Sartre, the process of writing stems from a writer’s need to remain essential in a future wherein he no longer exists. In writing, the writer “meets everywhere only his knowledge, his will, his plans, in short, himself” (Sartre 663). The writer leaves an implant of his/her essence in the written word – a legacy that survives the writer even when he/she is gone. Ultimately, Sartre explains: “Since the creation [the written work] can find its fulfillment only in reading, since the artist must entrust to another the job of carrying out what he has begun, since it is only through the consciousness of the reader that he can regard himself as essential to his work, all literary work is an appeal” (665). “To write”, Sartre concludes, “is to have recourse to the consciousness of others in order to make one’s self be recognized as essential to the totality of being; it is to wish to live this essentiality by means of interposed persons” (670). Thus, in writing –a process that appeals to the reader’s sense of freedom to read –  the writer relays his/her being through the reader and the reader’s process of reading, and with this process of reading, the existence of the writer lives on.

 

The writer in the artistic frame of Money is John Self. The novel is an account of John Self’s experiences, conversations, and other such interactions that help readers construct a view of his character. Self’s is the main authoritative voice in the novel, and it is primarily through his own recapitulation of his own actions and conversations where we may form opinions about him. There is very little informative self-reflection and there are only very few instances where Martin Amis breaks the artistic frame to explain the dramatic ironies that concern John Self. What we have, then, is a first- person past-tense narration of Self’s experiences. In this perspective, moreover, John Self may be seen as writing in retrospect, with an end in mind even from the beginning of the novel.

The end of the novel contains the narrative of Self’s near-death experience, and the end of John Self’s narrative expresses the extra-narrative note of Martin Amis whereby “John Self will no longer exist”. Such an ending affects the overall tone of Self’s narrative. His narration thus ceases to be a mere retelling of events in his life, but, with the threat of inexistence and nothingness in the novel’s Beyond looming over his existence as a charcter, becomes an appeal. The narrative becomes Self’s appeal for a connection with the readers through his writing. In fact, Amis notes: “To whom is the note addressed? To Martina, to Fielding, to Vera, to Alec, to Selina, to Barry – to John Self? No. It is meant for you out there, the dear, the gentle”. Self’s writing, in turn, becomes a space wherein he can write out the essence of his character, so that he no longer remains simply as a voice, but becomes a being whose essence and experiences are imprinted in what he writes. The novel itself, the “note”, becomes John Self. Amis states that “usually the note is the thing. You complete it, and then resume your time travel. It is the note and not the life that is cancelled out. Or the other way round. Or death. You never can tell, though, can you, with suicide notes”. In our case for the novel, the note is not canelled out: the note becomes the life.

 

As he comes closer to disappearance in the novel, John Self begins to exist not in the past, but in the present, a time between the past and what Richter calls the “as-yet-nonexistent future” (659), the future that will be John Self’s void of inexistence. Self tells the readers: “You know, during that time of pills and booze, during that time of suicide, my entire future flashed through my head. And guess what. It was all a drag! My past at least was – what? It was…rich. And now my life has lost its form. Now my life is only present, more present, continuous present” (392). Here, Self’s present becomes in tune with that of his readers – supposing that they have read his story thus far –  marking the fulfillment of their unity through reading, an achievement which in turn grants security in Self’s existence. With the survival of his existence secured through the process of writing and reading, John Self accordingly “signs off” (392). He says further, “I’m closer to you, I hope, than he’ll ever be” (392). Though the answer to whom “he” might be remains vague, it may be postulated that he is the Self of the past. The Self of the present indeed is closer to the reader than the Self living in the past.

John Self is a memorable character – though not necessarily the most likeable one. But it is also his unique character that draws the reader along through the novel. In this way, his carnivalesque character helps him in his case to find essentiality in his future inexistence by making the readers at least interested enough to see him through the narrative’s end, and, having such an end, give meaning and completion to the life retold in the novel. The novel is John Self’s life, and in the act of opening the book and reading its contents, the readers in their freedom breathe life into its words and pages, giving John Self a voice, a character, and ,ultimately, an existence.

 

 

 

WORKS CITED:

 

Amis, Martin. Money. Vintage, 2005

 

Brooks, Peters. Freud’s Masterplot. The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary                   Trends, ed. David H. Richter, 1161-1171. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Why Write? The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends,               ed. David H. Richter, 659-672. Boston: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2007.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Midsummer

Midsummer’s breeze,

the breath of June, no sooner blows

than floods the leaves of trees

and songs of birds

with your ‘membrance –

thoughts puffed into clouds

and sent back through the tears of the warm summer rain,

memories as keep our bond bound and sheltered

in my empty deep.

Empty it is, yet filled

with fragments of your once-attached soul,

splintered firmly upon the heart’s soft soil;

souls afore kindled leave embers which,

though turn cold, last awhile.

The loud silence

of these hollow summer days

echo the deep longing that follow

the blurred trail left behind

by your vagrant heart.

Vagabonds alike,

we so wander, called by empty summer

whose sunlit escapes bring not joy nor passion,

but wintered vigour that seek gladsome life in vain.

So we sail forth, you and I,

fooled by the season’s sparkling grin,

towards that which paradise

uncertainly points,

longing once more

to seek what in us abides though we know it not,

thus lost forever, with souls apart.

The Blacksmith

Staged below the night sky, sooty and strong,

The smithy stands spewing smoke and heat.

Within, the blacksmith hard at work:

A craftsman, a symbol, a mere figure perhaps.

 

His hammer he wields, and they are one.

Sparks cast off by its strike against the sword

Mark their bond, the bridge to the smith’s soul,

Tugging his heart to the blade,

Sending off thunders, the music of steel.

 

The anvil awaits, a platform for greatness.

Plain and blank, yet strong and patient –

The heart of the forge, a craftstand for beauty,

Working wonders and winning wars,

An essence of kingdoms, a slate for glory.

 

The sword, sharp and shiny,

A worthy warrior’s weapon, a stuff for legends,

Its handle gilt, its blade moon-kissed,

Sits meekly upon the wooden bench.

 

The man beholds,

Overtaken by wonder, soothed by satisfaction.

The man,

A bard of metallic poetry,

Weaver of empires, a knight unknown,

Rests. Proud of the day’s work.

 

Staged below the night sky, sooty and strong,

The smithy stands spewing smoke and heat –

Amongst mead-halls and huts,

Castles and pavements,

The highways and the by-ways.

Within, the blacksmith rests.

Within, the fire of his dreams, the sparks of his life.

Introducing the ‘Book of Ages’: The Prologue

In olden times where there yet ruled enchanted,

Praise-worthy, noble rulers – kings and queens

Of glorious kingdoms; where knights fought wars ever

‘Gainst foes relentless, beasts e’er despising;

Where when the damsel called afar distressed,

The prince in quick advancement to her goes,

Amidst vast dangers rescuing with valiance;

Much simpler was the world where th’atmosphere

Of every detail of it surreal felt,

Where strife amongst the groups of men occasioned

Without great frequency, and grief a moment

But fleetly passing through the halls of time –

In these forgotten times there rose heroes

Whose deeds are echoed still in poems and songs,

Through many winters, summers thence unchanged.

These heroes and their like today live on,

Though of their lives and chivalry no tales

Nor runes are told, save here where lion-hearted

And dauntless tasks are chronicled with wonder.

Photo taken from: http://us.123rf.com/400wm/400/400/nejron/nejron1210/nejron121000015/15645279-medieval-knights-on-grey-background.jpg

The Forest Maiden

Once as I walked upon a forest old,

I saw there stood a maiden fair:

About her a light shone gold,

And radiant as the stars above was her hair —

There I was left amazed in the cold night;

Of her, this tale I hereby write.

A rueful song she sang under a great tree;

Her heart was broken, her eyes on tears.

She sang, and sing she did till her heart was free;

This song I forgot not through the years.

Her voice was as that of a dying bird

Who sings and sings, albeit its song be not heard.

My heart was moved, and my life captivated;

For she sought back her prince’s love lost long ago

That for many a month she had left unrequited,

And now was but a vague dream covered in shadow.

I cried out loud ere her song was ended

And she looked at me as towards her I headed.

At once it so heavily dawned upon me

That ‘twas the tale of us twain she sang.

The night deepened though I can clearly see

She was the princess I loved ere time began.

I reached out to her feeble hand ,

For her I searched this wide land.

“Cry no more, my fair maiden,” I comforted.

“Your prince has come to bring you back.”

Her heart turned warm as its winter lifted;

Her grace, her beauty never did lack.

My search is over, my fair princess is with me,

And we came back betrothed to be.

Photo courtesy of http://www.zazzle.ca/mucha_knight_lady_painting_horses_forest_romantic_sticker-217735845749681073