Inauthenticity, Inadequacy, and Transience: The Failure of Language in “Prufrock”

Inauthenticity, Inadequacy, and Transience: The Failure of Language in “Prufrock”^[1]

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” widely regarded as the work that brought T.S. Eliot into a position of influence and prominence amongst his literary contemporaries, delineates the psychosocial trappings of a first-person speaker struck by the impossibility of identity, interaction, and authenticity in a modern society. Although the poem establishes J. Alfred Prufrock, a typical ‘anti-hero’ of modernist style, as its speaker and central focus, Eliot seeks to generalize to a broader social commentary: the piece reveals the paralyzing state of universal disempowerment in social interaction by exploring a broken system of signification and identity.

Eliot’s poem filters its communication through the first-person speaker, J. Alfred Prufrock; however, the audience is implicated directly and indirectly in the consciousness of Prufrock. Ironically, the central conflict of the poem is the subject’s inability to engage and communicate with the world around him. However, in multiple fashions, even in the very process of performance and reading of the poem, we the audience are interpellated into Prufrock’s hellish existence. The epigraph of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” draws from Dante’s Inferno, immediately conjuring the idea of Hell for the audience. The epigraph, in conjunction with the first line of the piece—“Let us go then, you and I” (1)—and the repetition of second-person and collective first-person pronouns, implicates the reader in an implied tour of Prufrock’s personal Hell, a state of imprisonment within his own consciousness.

Prufrock is a speaker characterized first and foremost by overwhelming fear and alienation, stemming from his hypersensitivity to time, his disillusionment with the failure of communication, and his inability to construct a stable self. He frequently questions his capacity to relate to those around him, wondering repeatedly, “[H]ow should I presume?” (54, 61). Prufrock, worrisome over the audacity implicit in presumption and fearful of the consequences, hesitates to engage at all, instead setting himself in frustrated isolation and insecurity. Throughout the work, Eliot insists that one of the few certainties of Prufrock’s bleak existence is, paradoxically, uncertainty: from Prufrock’s overarching and unnamed “overwhelming question” (10) to the oft-quoted “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach” (122), the clearest recurring element of the poem is Prufrock’s equivocation. The ambiguity of consequence is too dangerous for Prufrock. He is concerned that his participation in society shall “disturb the universe” (45) and so chooses rather to retreat into his tangled web of hypotheticals.

Eliot symbolizes the society Prufrock so fears in the third stanza as a yellow fog, invading the descriptions of the architecture and appearance of the city.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep. (15-22)

The description of this yellow fog is animalistic and untamed. Its presence is quiet but oppressive, weighing heavily on the tone of the poem with the sort of gaseous intractability and inescapability of our fluid and chaotic social formation and the hegemony that it relies upon. The yellow fog figuratively permeates the entire piece, ubiquitous and stifling, but most evidently as it encroaches on Prufrock’s discussion and distortion of time, beginning in the following stanza.

While the third stanza most overtly draws attention to Prufrock’s temporal hyper-awareness (using the frequent repetition of the word “time”), Eliot constructs an underlying theme of impermanence as early as the epigraph and first stanza of the poem. The original speaker of the epigraph, Guido da Montefeltro, reminds us of the imprisoning and irreversible flow of time, and signal words like “one-night” (6) and “tedious” (8) in the first stanza highlight a hyper-awareness of time. In spite of Prufrock’s implied worldview that genuine social interaction is dangerous, impossible, or even futile, he is painfully aware of the disappearance of opportunity within his hesitation. He admits, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” (51), “I grow old … I grow old …” (120), and, reflecting on his imprisonment, wonders, “[H]ow should I begin / To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” (59-60). In his position of retrospect, Prufrock imbues a clear tone of regret and loss, noting that he has expended most of his life in apprehension; he links his spent time to the humdrum by means of the “coffee spoons,” to the useless and disposable by means of “butt-ends.” By integrating a theme of transience and a tone of urgency, Eliot begins to explore Prufrock’s social fears while also preparing to demonstrate the failure of language, as I discuss later. Considering the entanglement of the reader in the poem’s exploration of Prufrock’s psychological torture, we read that transience and mortality command all of our day-to-day actions and interactions—and how could this not leave us terrified and alienated like Prufrock himself?

As a consequence of such social fear and detachment, Eliot suggests, Prufrock struggles to establish public or personal identity: because he cannot truly associate with other members of his world, he cannot classify himself within a framework of socially-defined identity. Prufrock frames his failure to adopt an archetype using a strikingly dehumanizing synecdoche: “I should have been a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” (73-74). Prufrock finds it more fitting that he be separated from the species than to continually find himself inadequate to the measure of social roles. These lines directly precede a process in which Prufrock evades commitment (as we learn is characteristic) by presenting three models of which he falls short, and then discarding the possibility of ever identifying his purpose.

First, Prufrock summons John the Baptist as a prototype by envisioning his own “head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter” (82), but then immediately negates the comparison in the next line: “I am no prophet” (83). Prufrock identifies with the tragic, violent end of John the Baptist, reminding us of his overwhelming fear of the outside world. He makes clear that he can relate only to the death of the man, but not to the life: Prufrock believes that he lacks some essence of a prophet—perhaps charisma or confidence, perhaps respectability or status.

Prufrock seeks to find a more apt comparison, now considering a person as socially tortured as he but who ultimately discovered meaning. Prufrock attempts to adopt a different Biblical figure as a model of identity:

Would it have been worth while […]

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.

That is not it, at all.” (90-98)

By invoking the character of Lazarus,^[2] Prufrock hopes to procure an archetype which fits him better than that of John the Baptist. However, Prufrock realizes that this mold is not adequate either; he questions whether he could interact with someone even with the support of enlightening, didactic knowledge of the afterlife. In so doing, he effectively ‘tries on’ an identity, only to abandon it upon fear of being misunderstood.

Ultimately, Prufrock comments on the ignobility of his very equivocation: “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be” (111). Prufrock is intensely aware of his reluctance to commit, to make a decision, reminiscent of the tragic Dane—but he actively degrades himself by rejecting the comparison. He suggests that, if anything, he is only fit to be a supporting character, and even then, only an obsequious and foolish one.

[I am] an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At time, indeed, almost ridiculous—

Almost, at times, the Fool. (112-9)

After the adoption and abandonment of three ambitious archetypes (John the Baptist, Lazarus, and Hamlet), Prufrock’s “almost” in lines 118 and 119 tells us that he is even reluctant to embody a supporting character with a clearly defined role. Again, considering the involvement of the reader in Prufrock’s plight, Eliot tells us that the literary and social characters which shape our models of human identity are inauthentic—that perhaps we are all destined to be no more than backing players to fill out a scene, or if we are lucky, provide comic relief.

To better understand Prufrock’s disenfranchisement, we must recognize Eliot’s portrayal of human interaction as broken, inadequate, and false. Within the structure of the poem, Eliot seems to imply the inadequacy of direct communication through circuitous, repetitious, and ambiguous text. Even as Prufrock introduces his “overwhelming question,” he almost simultaneously refuses our inquiry to understand what he communicates—“Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’” (9-10). By first calling attention to the ever-fleeting moments of time to instill a tone of haste, and then exacerbating those feelings with Prufrock’s continued hesitation, Eliot highlights the infinite insufficiency of language. Even though there will be “time yet for a hundred indecisions, / And for a hundred visions and revisions, / Before the taking of a toast and tea” (27-34), “in a minute there is time / For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse” (47-48). Eliot’s recursive language implies that while there is time, each moment will be inevitably filled with the paralyzing equivocation that we have come to expect from Prufrock. In a frustrated interjection, Prufrock sums it up well: “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” (104).

More subtly, though, Eliot incorporates only a few voices aside from Prufrock himself, and it is these characters who especially illuminate the alienating nature of interaction and language for Prufrock. It is important to note that while the entirety of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” seems to be an argumentative internal monologue within Prufrock’s consciousness, Eliot provides brief voices from hypothetical speakers imagined through the mediation of Prufrock’s mind.

The unnamed women of the poem are particularly telling: “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo” (35-6). This seeming non sequitur is repeated twice within the course of four stanzas. Between the two occurrences of this sentence, Prufrock reassures us (and, in turn, himself) that “there will be time / To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet” (26-27). Eliot combines a deliberate absence of identifying characteristics of these women, the phrase “come and go,” and a reference to inauthenticity of identity; this combination implies that these women are fungible, and that their commentary on the celebrated artist is merely a façade to suggest sophistication. They offer no substance of interaction beyond falsehood, flowing in and out of a room with identical, generic conversation while bearing contrived faces, formulated only to meet other contrived faces. In this way, Prufrock is disillusioned and discouraged from communication, realizing his mistrust of language for its inherent unreliability. We, in turn, are encouraged to perceive and reject the duplicity of common social interaction.

The subsequent hypothetical speakers in the poem seem to explain and rationalize Prufrock’s fears. In their sole moments of voice throughout the entire text, Prufrock insists that these speakers will criticize his appearance—“How his hair is growing thin!” (41) and “But how his arms and legs are thin!” (44)—or his failure to communicate, saying, “That is not what I meant at all. / That is not it, at all” (97-98, 109-110). Considering his anxieties of language, it is no surprise that Eliot’s character recognizes the quickly-misunderstood nature of communication beyond the superficial “talk of Michelangelo.” Nevertheless, Prufrock fears criticism for inadequacies which he must already recognize in himself: his deteriorating physical appearance, wasting away with each measured-out coffee spoon, or his inability to control language. This tension, this certainty of degrading or misconstrued response, further contributes to Eliot’s implication of a broken system of language as embodied in Prufrock’s alienation.

The penultimate voices Prufrock imagines, the mermaids, identify Prufrock’s proximity to interaction. In another moment of doubt and seemingly scattered thought, Prufrock tells us he has “heard the mermaids singing, each to each” (124). These mermaids symbolize Prufrock’s last appeal for communicative redemption. But alas, Prufrock realizes his isolation—“I do not think that they will sing to me” (125)—and it is human language itself leaves us with the final crushing words of the poem:

I have seen them [the mermaids] riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (126-31)

This final contrast serves to remind us that while Prufrock is close enough to hear, close enough to “linger in the chambers of the sea,” such hopes are dream-like, tenuous, ultimately shattered by human voices and all-engulfing reality. The reader will note that Prufrock and Eliot have shifted back to the collective first-person pronoun “we” for the final stanza, and distinguish in line 130 that the referent is not the sea-girls and Prufrock, but rather Prufrock and another party; we can reasonably interpret the other party is the audience. Eliot is illuminating once again that the plight of J. Alfred Prufrock and the plight of all humanity are parallel in their morbidity, futility, and failure. It is not just Prufrock who drowns; it is us.

J. Alfred Prufrock’s quest to construct a genuine, personal expression—a “love song,” even—results in an excursion through the infernal frustration of Prufrock’s psychosocial imprisonment. In his portrayal of this character’s alienation, indecision, fear, and disillusionment, T.S. Eliot demands that we too, wandering through certain half-deserted streets, are victims of the putrid yellow-smoke society around us: the snares of inauthentic identity, broken language, and constantly vanishing time.

Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” The Seagull Reader: Poems, 2nd edition, edited by Joseph Kelly, Norton, 2008, pp. 109-114.