[essay/小品文/短論] 英國文學：The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 與 The Waste Land

 

Prufrock's “overwhelming question” is the lingering doubt on an old man’s subjectivity, that is, “Who am I?” with a dramatic monologue through The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. However, against most of the readers’ expectations to see his way out, he doesn’t dig deeper into the two other following questions, “Where am I?” and “Where am I going?” He eventually falls into regression with an anti-climax ending, drowns to dissolution, and breaks down with his turbulent mind. 

     Although The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock is written before World War One, Prufrock demonstrates hopelessness as if he was a prisoner of war, and the war is the life he has lived. We can tell that Prufrock was not seeking the answer, but was busy with an anxiety-inducing, chaotic, ruminating thinking process. He acts as if he had tried his best to move on from the current situation, but is actually just tail chasing. Procrastination and cowardness of his “a hundred indecisions” (655) are crawling in the poem and disturbs the readers. As an old man, he surprisingly insists that  “[t]here will be time” (654). He escapes from thinking the question of “Who am I?” to nibble the freedom he thought he had in hand and even subconsciously refuses to admit that he will die someday. The echoing lines of “Do I Dare? ” (655) also show his panic and the pseudo freedom to choose.

     What we need to notice about the piece is because Prufrock represents “Modern Everyman.” The readers can at the same time feel disturbed but also relate to him because we all are fragile, weak, and afraid to change. The title itself is ironic because the piece is not loveless but saturated with frustration, repression, and the failure of oneself. 

     I would like to introduce the idea of “authenticity” from Martin Heidegger to explain why Prufock represents a “Modern Everyman.” Authenticity means when a person can really engage their way of living but does merely fall into the trivia of daily life, as Profruck sinks into his routine with “a toast and tea” (655).  Prufrock cannot pluck up the responsibility of making a decision for himself, and thus he cannot reach “authenticity” to live out his life. If he doesn’t make the choice, he doesn’t carry the heavy burden of responsibility for himself, where the pseudo freedom he thought he wrestles for is made. 

         Even with “thin arms and legs,” (655) Ulysses has set his heart ablaze “to strive, to seek, to find, but not to yield.” Prufrock wastes his time away, pondering over his weakness, but never takes up any action till the end of the poem. Old days, old ways. He let his inner voices disturb his life, and also had the most severe mental breakdown led by the other “human voices” (657) in the end.

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The Waste Land, a poem by T.S. Elliot, can be read as a poem about modern Western civilization. The piece has depicted a world where “all that is solid melts into air,” as Modernism proposes a way of being self-reflexive on one’s existence and identity. However, in the end, T.S. Elliot still urges for some spiritual salvation to save the whole heritage. 

     Dryness, inactivity, and the mere possibility of regeneration are the three important themes. Despite the piece seems to immerse the readers into some bleak aura with the themes, The Waste Land actually includes multiple western pieces of literature (to name a few, Fisher King, Shakespeare, and The Flower of Evil) and languages (English, French, German), and even offers a possible way out from the darkness--compassion, self-control, and harmony--in the Eastern (Hinduism) religious and philosophical scenarios. 

     The images in The Waste Land formulate an open-air, creepy playground, which suggests that the corruption and overjoy are too sinful for the people to request salvation and are doomed with emptiness. The dryness in the poem is shown in the first section with the image of stone, “dry stone and no sound of water” (661). Hence, a hopeless landscape of the wasteland is sketched to us readers. Even in the last section of What the Thunder Said, an imagism description repeats the theme of dryness, such as  “And no rock/ If there were rock/ And also water/ And water” (671) and “[d]rip drop drip drop drop drop drop/ But there is no water.”  

     Inactivity can be revealed by the conversation by the couple after sex. Although there were detailed and vivid images of the sex scene, it is followed by the anxious questions of the speaker, “What shall I do now? What shall I do?” (664). The question parallels the same dilemma of Prufrock in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, another piece by T.S. Eilot, “Do I dare?” The inactivity of the speaker was not only contrasted by the sex scene in the very beginning of the section, it is also reinforced by the questions because she does not dare to face the trying life with boredom, but resorts to inactivity, waiting for the dead god to “knock upon the door.”  

     The mere possibility of regeneration can be seen in the conversation which was about the cycle of the “corpse” (662) that was planted but dug up by a dog. The spooky scene forces the readers to notice   “no one is an outsider” from the immoral with the intentional presence of the looming death. Besides the incidents made by humans, the theme is also shown with nature at the beginning of the poem, “Winter kept us warm, covering/ Earth in forgetful snow” (660). In the wasteland, forgetness forges strength to live. Under such conditions, it is hard to see any kind of regeneration that might lead to some authentic self-identification and progression.

     In the end, T.S. Elliot has penned, “Ganga was sunken” (672), to suggest that hope and salvation come. He later mercifully discloses the piece that harasses the readers’ nerve-- frustration, anxiety, and nothingness--with a religious, wise lecture: a calm sea, and a heart that can finally respond to such tranquility.