In T.
S. Eliot's poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,
published in 1917, Prufrock is an outsider. His movement
within the boundaries of city life is the hovering of a
detached soul. He does not identify with the world of 'cakes
and ale and ices'; because he cannot. The voices of his
environment recede from him, and ultimately he declares
that he cannot hear the mermaids singing. The traits of
an outsider in Prufrock can be better detected in the
light of a comparison with an existentialist outsider
figure: Albert Camus' character Meursault, from his novel
The Outsider, published in 1942. The two can be
seen as consecutive stages in the development of the
modern man's predicament.
Both characters, I feel, are products of heightened
realism, and this is reflected in their quest for truth.
As examples of realist figures, both provide a
microscopic view of their world through meticulous
descriptions. The similarity in their environments,
perhaps coincidental, is reflected in the fact that both
Prufrock and Meursault enter 'sawdust restaurants with
oyster shells'.
Prufrock's song opens with a peep into Dante's inferno
and goes on to enter a labyrinthine and misty landscape
where it seems the smog will smother him. Meursault's
hell arrives when he is tried for murder. Up until that
point he had been blissfully unaffected by so-called
social norms. Hell for him, is the loss of innocence (almost
like Christian idea of the Fall) and the people who
condemn him. As Sartre says, 'Hell is Other people'. And
despite all attempts, there is no escape. Prufrock tries
to wriggle out of his emotional void by singing his love
song, but love does not exist. Meursault does not even
try to 'love', because having come later than Prufrock,
he knows the impossibility of love. He says
she asked me if I
loved her. I told her that it didn't mean anything
but that I didn't think so.
His mother's death is
nothing more to him than mere fact. There is no sense of
loss because for him love had been impossible. Love
implies a mastering of the Other, which is impossible.
Detached from all essences, for Meursault social ties
consist simply in getting used to the Other, like his
neighbour had got used to his mangy dog.
It is interesting to note the title of the book in which
Prufrock was first published: Prufrock and other
observations. Observations! The very word implies
detachment. And this is more obvious because throughout
the poem, Prufrock is never involved in the scenes he
describes. His observations are objective:
In the room the
women come and go
talking of Michelangelo.
But the detachment is
not total, because Prufrock has known what he sees
already:
For I have known
them all already, known them all -
This partial
detachment is implied in the philosophy of F. H. Bradley
which had influenced Eliot, as well as in existentialist
philosophy. For Bradley, from the point of view of the
subject the psychological event is objective, while from
that of the observer it is the subject's personal
experience. From this Eliot concludes that objects of
traditional philosophy are 'half objects'. According to
Sartre, too, man's 'being-for-itself' is not absolute.
True to this condition, Meursault cannot help getting
involved in his trial, even if for a moment. At first he
adopts a detached attitude, then he seems to revolt
against the fact that very little consideration is taken
of him during court procedures. Finally he recovers his
detachment from what is occurring, his mind wanders from
the trial, and he would like to be over with it. Thus
partial detachment, in both cases, is an essential trait
of the outsider.
Prufrock and Meursault cannot escape from the hell around
them. And the closer Prufrock gets to the room where he
hopes for love and escape, the more he perceives
everything as fragmented and alien. There are eyes, arms
and severed heads. The love song cannot serve as a
romantic escape route, because the sense of wholeness
required cannot be found in a fragmented world. Prufrock's
very life is fragmented: it can be measured out in coffee
spoons. By the end of the poem there is an impression
that the 'you and I' are parts of the same person - one
looks on, as the other acts.
That Meursault too is a split self is clear from the
remarkable disparity in tone between the first and second
parts of The Outsider. The immediacy in the
former is replaced by a less confident tone in the latter.
The second part is spoken with an intuition, if not
intellection, of what he represents to society. This
might be the result of the reaction he observes in the
spectators of the trial:
He said that I had
not wanted to see mother; that I smoked, I'd slept
and I had white coffee. I felt something stirring in
the whole room; for the first time I realized that I
was guilty.
In Meursault the
selves are further sub-divided, even to the extent of non-existence.
This is especially poignant when the Public Prosecutor
bends over him and declares that he finds no soul. There
is again a parallel to the dissection image in Prufrock:
And when I am
formulated, sprawling on a pin
In both cases we see
that the outsider has no claim to a comprehension of
things in totality. Not even their own selves. In the
modern world uncertainty has replaced totality.
Prufrock at least can hope, whereas Meursault does not
know the essence of hope. Prufrock repeats 'There will be
time' because he believes that in time lies man's secret
power of creation and destruction; birth and death. But
for Meursault, death is absurd: he kills without
particularly wanting to. In his eyes the sun is as much
responsible for the Arab's death as he is himself. Death
simply does not matter. This is also reminiscent of
Dostoievski's Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment,
1866) in a similar situation, with which Eliot was
familiar.
Even time itself is questioned by the outsider; he does
not work within its paradigm. The first part of The
Outsider starts with 'Mother died today', while in
the second part Meursault has already been in prison for
a few days. This discrepancy once again highlights the
split self, and the focus is shown as being more on point
of view than on sequential time. Therein lies the
difference between Meursault and Prufrock. In the final
analysis, Prufrock too, seems to waver in the hope he has
invested in time. It seems that the outsider in Prufrock
resurfaces with this faltering in conviction.
In both cases the semblance of hope that may have been
raised is extinguished suddenly. And strangely both
Prufrock and Meursault have the feeling of being drowned;
Prufrock in a sea, and Meursault in a colourless liquid,
like sinking into the sickly sweet viscous substance of
nature. The viscous is an aspect of the world which fills
us, says Sartre, with natural instinctive revulsion. In
the viscous, there is the possibility that the in-itself
might absorb the for-itself. Both Prufrock and Meursault
thus suffer an outsider's fate.
In Prufrock and Meursault we find two classic cases of
the outsider. In both cases there is a tortuous quest for
truth, and detachment has been necessary to provide a
viewpoint for what is truly real. But after its discovery,
the truth is either dismissed or subverted. Prufrock is
dissuaded from telling us everything;
If one, settling
her pillow by her head,
Should say: 'That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.'
As for Meursault, he
is hanged for his revelation.
Both characters refuse to lie. They refuse to indulge in
what existentialism calls 'bad faith'. Prufrock's love
song is truthful in that it cannot be a love song. But
what kind of truth does it reveal? As Camus says,
Lying isn't only
saying what isn't true. It is also in fact saying
more than is true . . . We all do it to make life
simpler. But, contrary to appearances, Meursault does
not want to make life simpler. He says what he is, he
refuses to hide his feelings and society immediately
feels threatened.
The same applies to
Prufrock.
Camus' novel incorporates in itself the post-war
deterioration in human values. The disowning of social
essences as hypocrisy is intrinsic to the realization of
the hopelessness of so-called human values. The only way
for Meursault to remain true to himself is to reject
everything but his existence as false. And since there is
no reason for his existence, it is a tragic existence.
Being an earlier creation, Prufrock is perhaps more
hopeful than Meursault. But he wavers and admits to
uncertainty. He too suffers from the existential plight
of indecision, asking,
So how should I
presume?
. . . And how should I begin?
Escape from the hell
that surrounds him lies in a realization of the truth of
existence. His quest and its realization are similar to
Meursault's. His fate therefore is equally tragic.
On looking at these characters together, one is surprised
by their startling psychological resemblance. Though
temporally separated, Prufrock and Meursault are
essentially similar. From our comparison Meursault's
character is revealed as a development on that of
Prufrock, so that despite their differences they seem to
be parallel examples of the outsider.
Texts
Camus, Albert. The Outsider. English trans. by Joseph
Laredo. Penguin Classics.
Eliot, T. S. Selected Poetry. ed. Manju Jain. CULT.
Bibliography
Bush, Ronald. Eliot
Champigny, R. A Pagan Hero
Lavine, T. Z. From Socrates To Sartre
Sartre Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness
Sartre Jean-Paul. No Exit
Scofield, Martin. T. S. Eliot: A Study
Wollheim, Richard. Eliot and Bradley
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