Fragmented nature of Eliot

• But fragments on the surface. They form an underlying picture of the social whole. A mosaic 

Prufrock 

• Over attentiveness, fanaticism, obsession–fetishism. 
• Psychic 

Contradiction and Women 

• Attraction and revulsion 
• Prufrock desires intimacy
• But his desires are fetishized. The women, longing, and vulnerable, shy tone are all his  object of desires, of an image dreamed up to project such objects… 
• Isolation, dehumanization for Prufrock 
• Coping mechanism
• Social and private world. Contradiction
• Sociable world of women 
• Prufrock is a sense of authenticity or privacy for himself
• The women as a group or ensemble that lack individuality. 
• Prufrock does not talk to any one of them. He confronts a group of them, a whole, a pool of shadows 
• Prufrock as a product of the social mass of women
  • Prufrock becomes part of the whole that he imagines 

Derogatory: Talking of Michelangelo

• Derogatory phrase for women 
• Empty social talk 
• Michelangelo just a token of social pretense, prestige
• Got nothing to do with art itself 

Sense of Paradox 

Prufrock’s voices do not stand for anything but their interactions with Prufrock and such inventions do. 

Vantriquilzation 

• Prufrock consists of these different voices, their interactions, allusions. 
• Prufrock is no Prufrock. He is these voices. There is no Prufrock… 

Prufrock through the women, scenes, and dialogue 

• An invention of himself through the women. He reproduces his agony, isolation, and anxiety through the women, who metamorphose and surface as Prufrock–an image of himself, a projection seen through the women. Of what’s behind. Otherwise, he can not instantiate, project, or reflect his emotions onto anyone, thereby secluding his isolation more. Though it is through the women, it is a first hand phenomenon, at least for anyone but him. 
• He then becomes himself to a product of his own projection…women. Ie a mask. He is both the producer and product. A mask and the masquerade. He affects himself by the effect of his own fantasy, reducing himself to a part of his whole 

Prufrock wears the mask, but projects it on to the reader

• The woman reveals, unwraps, and expresses all of Prufrock’s incompetence, in inhibitions, and vulnerabilities.
  • That is who he is, not the women, but the relation between the women and him. He is nothing but a fantasy, abstraction, created by both the dream itself and the person who dreams, but we no longer know who it is anymore… 
• Anyhow, this lack of permanence, or total abstractness is precisely the only way that he can correlate or connect himself with others. He is that void and his relation with others are equally and subsequently devoid of substance. Its a negative loop. He consecutively makes himself worse and more empty. Ie. the Hollow Man. An echo: The voices (women) do not matter, but Prufrock’s interaction with such abstraction does.

He wears a mask, assumes someone else’s shadow to meet others. And within this shadow lies the multitude of paradoxes, contradictions, questions of self, identity, whether external, internal, or a superfluous identity. 

The modern age…

And what of today? What about 100 years from now. How do I compare to Eliot’s time. What can be said about us. And so what happened to the “ faint stale smells of beer?” 

Fake plastic trees shall fall, and whatever we make, we make of plastic. 

Bathos 

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

-to build up something, some serious, real thing.

– But deflationary, diminish our expectation, reduced to the “taking of a toast and tea.” 

– we go from “murder” and “create,” ie. some prophecy of the world to just a mundane taking of a tea.

The Sea

The sea and us are the same. It’s life in itself. Uncontainable. The sea as a representation of life. Our thinking is a measure of life–to make conscious of… Conscious of  the dynamic environment around us. TO think. TO murder us with too much thinking and not feeling or creativity. So, to murder becomes the convention of senseless talk or narrow reason, which the women in the poem dominate. And this murders or smolders creativity–Prufrock. But that’s self-defeating. He’s defeated by precisely the thing that he opposes. 

Portrait of a lady

Irony 

Friendship as an euphemism for romantic relationship

You have the scene arranged itself. 

• you do not possess the scene, but the scene moves itself. Agency 

Lots of “culture” around. 

• Chopin. 
• More staging–candles. 
• Darkened room. To use the lighting in a certain way to manipulate the mood .
• Conventions, cliche. 
• To entertain friends. 
• Social etiquettes. 
• Classical elements. Violin, cornets. 

Women not recognizing the irony. The male speaker does. Reference to Juliet is already doomed

‘Let us say’ – hypothetical, provisional. Everything we say can be held against us 

  Held up for irony or ridicule. 

Refined, carefully managed, staged self.

Pretend to listen to Chopin and be cultured; but we cannot hear nor understand life through “finger-tips”

Old Lady 

Now that lilacs are in bloom
She has a bowl of lilacs in her room
And twists one in her fingers while she talks.
'Ah, my friend, you do not know, you do not know
What life is, you who hold it in your hands';
(Slowly twisting the lilac stalks)
'You let it flow from you, you let it flow,
And youth is cruel, and has no remorse
And smiles at situations which it cannot see.'
I smile, of course,
And go on drinking tea.

Old lady conferring to the gentleman

• We are put in locks of conventions and cliches 
• no vitality of life, of stimulation. Dying, stagnate
• Old lady says we hold our lives in our hands, as she holds a lilac, twisting its stalk. 

What can be said and unsaid–the correlative objective. To use objects, images, things to represent the emotions that social conventions do not say, to convey without saying or commenting on such emotions. 

Three movements of the poem are a dialectic. Thesis and antithesis. 

Last movement 

“Perhaps you can write to me.'
My self-possession flares up for a second;
This is as I had reckoned.
'I have been wondering frequently of late
(But our beginnings never know our ends!)
Why we have not developed into friends.'
I feel like one who smiles, and turning shall remark
Suddenly, his expression in a glass.
My self-possession gutters; we are really in the dark.”

• Male character 
• No longer certain of himself. 

“And should I have the right to smile?”

–meaning irony, skeptical

Smile at the lady’s irony (death and living by conventions)?

Yes and no. That’s not the way of life, but you should recognize it without relying on it. 

Seizing the uncontainable reality of life, of self, not the social self that one invents 

Part of the function of culture is to get beyond culture. But for Eliot, culture is static here. People are put within its frame, its convention and limit. We cannot move. 

• Its dynamic, generative, productive
• Get beyond the culture you already have to become cultured 
• A means of enabling