Moldovan Anamaria Catalina,
III, German-English
The Poet in the City
The flâneur
in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
By T. S. Eliot
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
The term flâneur comes from the french masculine
noun flâneur—which has the basic meanings of “stroller”,
“lounger”, “saunterer”, “loafer”—which itself comes from the French verb flâner, which means “to stroll”. Originally the term is coined by Charles
Baudelaire (1821-1867) and the symbolists and refers to somebody who observes
the city or and enjoying the walk and not in a hurry to just get from one place
to another, but to just experience the
urban cityscape, alley ways and hidden corners observing the immediate. According to Baudelaire, the flâneur moves through the labyrinthine
streets and hidden spaces of the city, admiring its attractions and fearful pleasures, but
remaining somehow detached and apart from it. They aren’t walking to get something, or to go
somewhere, they aren’t even shopping (which since the beginning of modern times
is quite common, to walk through the city for the sake of shopping). Flâneurs are standing in deliberate opposition to
capitalist society, with its two great imperatives, to be in a hurry, and to
buy things (as a protest against the former, there was in Paris a brief vogue
for flâneurs to amble around town with tortoises on
leashes, Salvador Dali was one of them). They are wondering about the lives of
those they pass, constructing narratives for them, they are eavesdropping on
conversations, they are studying how people dress and what new shops and
products there are (not in order to buy anything—just in order to reflect on them
as important pieces of evidence of what human beings are about). The flâneurs are avid enthusiasts of what Baudelaire
called “the modern.” Unlike so many of Baudelaire’s highbrow
contemporaries, flâneurs aren’t just interested in
the beauty of classical objects of art, they relish what is up to date, they
love the trendy and theirs surroundings, and experience an actual physical
stroll but it is a way of philosophical thinking and a way of seeing and
feeling things. Walking for walkings sake.
The tendence
of the world towards materialism, consumism, and mass reactions woke up in the
19th century Symbolists the fascination of the motif of the journey.
Time was passing incredibly fast and offered the sensation of compressed time.
And for the poets through their journey, time seemed to stop. Do I dare/ Disturb the universe?/In a minute
there is time/For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse. (T. S.
Eliot: The Love Song of J. Alfred
Prufrock ). They were analysing the surroundings and letting everything to
get through them so that they could
offer through their creative works another perspective. A perfect example for
this is the austriac authors Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel, The Notebook of Malte
Laurids Brigge or T. S. Eliot poem, The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. In
the first mentioned, Malte is Rilke’s character that does not do anything, and
nothing is done him. He just walks and observs the streets of Paris. Everything
Malte experiences, experiences because of his sensibility and his receptivity
towards what he sees.
T.S. Eliot
never meditated on the nature and function of literature (poetry), and in the
essay The Pensees of Pascal (1931),
he compared the position of the poet with that of the christian believer who is
not usually very preoccupied to explain the outer world, not particularly
affected by its disorder, and not too willing (in modern terms) to maintain its
values. From this point of view, Eliot's great poem, The Waste Land (1922), is a manifest attempt - and sure in his
lyrical substance - to identify and analyze in depth just the disorder and lack of stability of
the modern world .
The anxiety of the times stirred the creative in the
Modernists artists. The Modernists poets turned the back to ‘normal’ society
and created a world of their own. For example Apollinaire’s Vandémiaire:
I am the gullet of Paris/ and I’ll go out and
drink the whole universe if I feel like it.
The great work of
T. S. Eliot, the poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock ,
represents a careful examination of ‘the tortured psyche of the
prototypical modern man—overeducated, eloquent, neurotic, and emotionally
stilted.’ The poem is a clear analysis of undefined states. “Prufrock” displays the
two most important characteristics of Eliot’s early poetry. First, it is
strongly influenced by the French Symbolists, like Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and
Baudelaire, whom Eliot had been reading almost constantly while writing the
poem. From the Symbolists, Eliot takes his sensuous language and eye for
unnerving or anti-aesthetic detail that nevertheless contributes to the overall
beauty of the poem (the yellow smoke and the hair-covered arms of the women are
two good examples of this). The Symbolists, too, privileged the same kind of
individual Eliot creates with Prufrock: the moody, urban,
isolated-yet-sensitive thinker.
Let us go then, you
and I,
When the evening is spread out against the
sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted
streets,
The muttering retreats
Of
restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with
oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious
argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question
...
Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking
of Michelangelo.
A big theme
in this poem is time. Time: the forms of temporality and human hypostase at
different ages are the outstanding concerns. Apparently, we are dealing with a
resemblance to Laforgue's (french symbolist poet) poetry. But, at a careful
reading, it is clear that Eliot's monologues remain observations, detached from
the protagonists with whom the author juggles. The text marks the clear rupture
of any post-Victorian poetic tradition, colloquial language dominates, and the
situations that allude to it impress the ordinary reader used to victorian
stiff writings. Even though the voice remains vague and insufficiently defined,
the images used by Eliot are pregnant, the reader has the feeling - as is the
case with some imagistic poems - that he understands exactly how Prufrock
feels. Prufrock is surrounded by objects that would apparently be meant to help
him find the answers to the questions he is looking for with determination. Even
though only the questions and dilemas were put with determination, since
determination in life he was lacking. But what are the questions? Ambiguity
dominates the poem, which may be an amorous issue or human dignity itself.
The character, Prufrock, is his own enemy, he
is quite depressed and he thinks to much
before speaking to people. He is quite vain as well, and concerned that people
will talk about his esthetics, even though he is a stylish, classy dresser. He
does not eat a peach because he has a beard, and he is worried his beard will
get dirty and messy, even though the peach was tasty, he did not want the peach
to drip of his chin.
One of the lessons that Prufrock did not
learn was that, life can be lived and enjoyed without being wrapped up in the
opinion of others.
He mentions
the women talking about Michelangelo two times, because he probably was drown
to them. Whether he likes it or not he wants to talk to them. But he does not.
Was he feeling intimidated because they were talking about Michelangelo?
Probably not. Was he over them? Like feeling better than them, who knows. Or
maybe he thinks it is a bit of cliché. He just leaves an ambiguous
explanation behind, playing with language.
He tells us
that he understands people, because as he says he already knows it all, he saw
it all, he saw the arms, concerned with what bracelets they should be wearing.
In his opinion women are materialistic and he has the view that people will
eventually all make assumtions about you, that they will put labels on you and
put you into cathegorizes, which is ironic since he is doing that in the poem
too, saying that people are worthless. He does not know what to say to the
people he sees, he is thinking of saying maybe that he walked around and saw
people smoking in the windows, and that that gave him certain thoughts. He has
intense thoughts and he is in a dilma, not knowing if he should share his
thoughts with others or not. Prufrock
knows, in any case, that he cannot be the hero of anyone’s story; he cannot be
Hamlet (despite Hamlet’s similar bouts of indecision), instead, he can be
called even a Fool. He imagines himself growing old, unchanged, worrying about
his health and the “risks” of eating a peach. Still, he faintly hears the
mermaids of romance singing in his imagination, even though they are not
singing to him. In a final imagined vision, he sees these nymphs of the sea,
free and beautiful, calling him. Reality, however, intrudes in the form of
“human voices,” perhaps those of the art-chattering women, and he is “drowned”
in his empty life.
Prufrock
is sort of an artist between common men. He is attached to analyzing and meditating on
life. "I
have measured out my life with coffee spoons." The statement evokes careful
precision. Prufrock is living his life in carefully measured doses. He does not allow himself joy or excesses. He
is not a man prone to extremes or one who would do anything out of the ordinary
or unexpected. Spontaniety is not his way of life. Coffee spoons can refer to
the fact that he uses coffee spoons at all of the teas he has been to, but
moreso it creates an image of one who is precise and exact-Prufrock would never
just dump the sugar into his tea! Each and every decision he makes is carefully
weighed and measured. Furthermore,
coffee spoons symbolize the social rituals that Prufrock so dislikes: the
“taking of a toast and tea” that obstructs any real conversation.
He is a man who wanders narrow streets at dusk and sees
a reflection of himself in the “lonely men in shirt-sleeves” who smoke pipes
and lean out of windows.Prufrock must tire of the restraint, yet he too
restricts himself.
Prufrock does not want
to disturb the universe, without asking. That would mean taking a risk, and
risks are not Prufrock’s thing. Even though he has not done anything but
thinking yet, he insists that everything can be changed in a minute, if only he
could have the decision. But once he revises the decision he made, everything
could change back again. He is overthinking everything and in the end he does
not do nothing, but thinking.
Eliot used usual
emotions that one modern man could have and made them poetry.
Bibliography
Charles
Baudelaire,The
Painter of Modern Life, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1964). Orig. published in Le Figaro, in 1863.
Bijan Stephen: In Praise of the Flâneur. October 17, 2013: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/author/bstephen/
SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Eliot’s Poetry.” SparkNotes.com.
SparkNotes LLC. 2002. Web. 31 May 2017. http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/eliot/citing.html
http://psychogeographicreview.com/baudelaire-benjamin-and-the-birth-of-the-flaneur/
