[In the following essay, Bentley argues that Prufrock's failures are the result of his inability to articulate his needs.]

Late in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the demoralized persona sums himself up with the poignant line. “And in short, I was afraid.” Commentators on the poem usually assume that he is afraid of women, afraid of people, afraid of life itself. He is thus regarded as a pitiful neurotic and a failed dandy. I do not wish to dispute these commentaries. As far as they go they are correct even though they fail to see the aspect of Prufrock which can almost be called heroic. But when we read the poem with an awareness that Eliot was an apprentice philosopher when he wrote it, we cannot easily ignore the presence of arguments, questions, descriptions and other modes of verbal activity which occasion and give form to Prufrock's fear. In what follows I will argue that the cause of Prufrock's misery is the necessity of existing through the medium of speech.

Two preliminary points must be made before considering the poem as a set of variations on the fear of language. First, we must note that language is traditionally the means to both contemplation and worldly action. In The Human Condition Hannah Arendt distinguishes between the life of contemplation devoted to the discovery of eternal truth and the life of worldly action. The medium of worldly action is self-assertive speech, a sequence of verbal renditions which reveal an individual's essential being. Dante, in the Vita Nuova, had worldly speech in mind when he wrote the following passage:

For in every action what is primarily intended by the doer, whether he acts from natural necessity or out of freewill, is the disclosure of his own image. Hence it comes about that every doer, in so far as he does, takes delight in doing; since everything that is desires its own being, and since in action the being of the doer is somehow intensified, delight necessarily follows … Thus, nothing acts unless [by acting] it makes patent its latent self.

Prufrock, we must note, rejects both action and contemplation. The opportunities for “making patent his latent self” are there in the rooms full of eyes and voices. The language of action fails him, and he has also evaded those “overwhelming questions” which might have led him into an alternative mode, the life of contemplation. By abandoning both thought and social action, he loses his chances of participating in the two categories of existence provided by western tradition.

The second preliminary point concerns the nature of philosophy in the early twentieth century. The emergent concept in 1910 was that philosophy was obliged to become a self-referential activity if it was to maintain its authenticity. This means, in simple terms, that the language of discourse was a problem of greater concern than any of those subjects philosophers traditionally discoursed upon. An overwhelming question like, “What is the value of life?” was no longer the first stage in a quest for an answer. It was itself the object of study, a study which quickly revealed that the question was only verbal behavior of an eccentric and confused sort with no recognizable meaning at all. It was a pseudo-question because its terms could not be defined. As Nietzsche pointed out in The Twilight of the Idols, the only useful response to it was to speculate on what kind of diseased mentality would take it seriously. “The value of life,” he says, “cannot be assessed by the living because they are interested parties and thus not fit judges.” It cannot be assessed by the dead either—“for a different reason.” To put it briefly, answers no longer overwhelm us by being difficult and uncertain; questions overwhelm us by being impossible for a judicious person to ask.

On a fundamental level “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is a dramatization of the impossibility of asking questions—both in the realm of contemplation and the realm of action. On a more generalized level it presents a vivid rendering of the fear that all language evokes in those who, like Prufrock, sense that it is no longer a valid medium of self-assertion and self-disclosure. The poem suggests, illustrates, and evades such language modes as love song, confession, argument, explanation, and description. In the process the poem calls into serious question the truth of all assumptions about the formal coherence of speech, speaker, and subject of speech. “It is impossible to say just what I mean,” says Prufrock. If we are to have a chance of understanding him, we must understand the exact nature of his inability to find words and a syntax adequate to his message. We must note that language is the substance of Prufrock's inner self and thus the necessary means of acting out, maintaining, disclosing and even having more than an inchoate inner self. When we feel Prufrock's sense of a dissonant relation between himself and his verbal renditions of himself, we must also feel with him that language is an inevitable covering up of reality, not a disclosing from which “delight necessarily follows.” Speech is a set of falsifications like clothing, grooming, perfume, fantasizing, and elegant phrasemaking, not a sequence of enactments of one's true being emerging at the center of an on-going drama which is the essential self.

We can now proceed to clarify and demonstrate these assertions by looking closely at the text: Before the poem begins we encounter two examples of language denying itself. The title announces a love song by someone whose way of giving his name defines a remote formality that clashes with the mood of a love song. Al, Alfie, Fred, or even Alfred Prufrock may sing such a song, but “J. Alfred Prufrock” can only conjure the image of a public functionary. Those who part their names on the left do not suggest intimacy. The epigraph from Dante denies language in another way. Guido will confess because no one will hear him. He communicates his terror, even in hell, of what people will think of his inner being. Already condemned by God, Guido still fears the condemnation of men. In the poem to follow no love song is sung and a confession is heard only because we are, like Dante, temporary residents in the speaker's hell.

The poem opens with symmetrical tropes which change the free-floating insubstantials of evening and sky into the hard substantiality of patient and table, followed by a reversal of rhetoric which changes the substantiality of streets into the insubstantiality of an argument. We discover a dialectic of abstract and concrete with the speaker's mind functioning as an unstable synthesis. We must consider what happens here carefully, for it established the concept of what follows. The first trope begins with the second line: “When the evening is spread out against the sky …” Evening is neither a thing nor a time of day; it is a quality of light, grammatically a noun but actually an adjective. The same must be said of the sky; it is a quality of light and the illusion of a shape. It is also an adjective. The two terms are in fact synonyms, but they are connected by a verb phrase, “spread out against,” which is appropriate to the contiguity of two solid objects, like a body on an operating table. Quite simply, the opening lines of the poem cannot be accurate descriptions of the world. Adjectives do not relate to each other in a manner appropriate to the relations of nouns to each other. The emotional power of resonances emanating from the figure etherized on a table is such that we are apt to miss the fact that it is a metaphor of an environment which cannot exist at all.

In passing we must recall that this kind of linguistic dislocation occurs frequently in Eliot's early poetry. In “Morning at the Window” the fog tears the smile from a woman's face. The smile then hovers in the air and vanishes behind the roof tops. And in “Preludes” we encounter the line, “His soul stretched tight against the sky.” In such cases we are in the presence of a need to describe the world as it cannot exist, to substitute a verbally conjured actuality for the actuality that we have in common. Language thus creates a private world not only unique to the speaker but unique to his moment. Speaker, speech, and things spoken of all have different forms; they are isolated from each other in a world where the power of contrast obliterates the power of similarity. In such a context metaphor is present to dramatize the inauthenticity of metaphor.

In the lines following the first trope “Prufrock” continues the process of illustrating the lack of coherence between describer, description, and things described. The streets, we learn, are retreats which “mutter”; they speak, after a fashion, but say nothing we can understand. Also, the hotels, which we wish to regard as low rent retreats, themselves somehow use the streets as places into which to retreat during restless nights. As readers we want the text to make sense of some kind, so we usually try not to read too closely at this point. As critics we may try to make sense of it by showing that some sort of synecdoche is functioning in which streets contain hotels which contain retreats which contain muttering. Both readings falsify the text. Let us accept the fact that it makes no literal sense at all to evoke “half-deserted streets / The muttering retreats / Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels.” It is in that lack of empirical precision that the poem's identity and meaning reside. It is not the elegantly balanced nonsense that Elizabeth Sewell found borrowed from Lewis Carroll; it is the nonsense that arises when language is exposed as an autotelic structure with only accidental relations with the realities it attempts to capture.

From this perspective we are ready to perceive that the “argument of insidious intent” and the “patient etherized upon a table” are parallel, symmetrical tropes. One masks an impressionistic evening and sky, while the other rescues us from a surrealistic jumble of streets, hotels, and other urban bric-a-brac. The “argument,” however, is an on-going process with its own tendencies which will not allow it to remain locked into a balanced position opposite to that patient on the table. It leads to an overwhelming question that we are requested not to ask about. Language about qualities has led to language about objects, but that has quickly reverted to language about language the speaker prefers not to specify. Note that the sequence of argument and question has been reversed. Traditionally, a question leads to an argument. Here the question is the dead end of speech as a mode of knowing.

The most distressing aspect of this opening part of the poem will be manifest if we see it as a monologue emerging from the philosophic traditions of Europe. Descartes, to use the most famous and accessible example, wanted to answer the question, “What can I know?” His answer was the well known cogito ego sum. The fact that he is processing data (thinking, as he quaintly put it) proves that he exists. The existence of thinking demonstrates the existence of a thinker. In syntactic terms this means that a predicate cannot exist without a subject. Although this may be true when the concern is declarative sentences in the Indo-European languages, it is not a valid assertion about human or any other kind of existence. Nietzsche summed up the problem with one vivid sentence: “Perhaps we are not rid of God because we still have faith in grammar.” We and the rest of the world seem to be a predicate, so a metaphysical subject has to exist—if the universe wishes to satisfy our desires for syntactic decorum. Once philosophical enquiry focused itself on its own tools, the chances for demonstrating any absolutes, including both God and an essential self, vanished. No serious thinker was likely to require either himself or the universe to conform to the customs of a notoriously finite syntax. For Prufrock this means that the cogito must work as follows: I think—but only about insubstantials; therefore I exist—but only as an insubstantial. I use metaphors to change them into solids; therefore, insofar as I am a substantial entity, I am only a metaphor that masks rather than reveals my existence.

Here, then, is the guilty secret Prufrock carries and wishes at all costs to conceal. He is a tangle of metaphors pretending to be a person. He is the opposite of a solipsist. Other people exist, or appear to exist, whereas he cannot escape the knowledge that he is an emptiness hidden by talk, clothing, a body, and a repertoire of prepared faces. His proposed visit to the salon where women speak of Michelangelo is an attempt to find a refuge from the overwhelming language which arises in the streets. In the salon big issues are drained of importance. Questions are lifted and dropped on a plate, like bitten macaroons. They are used as material to be shaped into playfully motivated verbal structures, phrases valued for their symmetry, their form rather than for their content. Prestige in the salon is awarded to those most adept in using elegant self-referential language. This does away with the anxiety questions in a straightforward speech inspire. But Prufrock fears the use of this language aimed at himself. When someone says, “How his hair is growing thin!” or “How his arms and legs are thin!” he quickly shifts the focus to his clothing: “My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to my chin / My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin.” Clothing and grooming are used here as they were used by Swift in A Tale of a Tub. An emphasis on surfaces hides the painful facts which lie beneath them. Decoration deflects attention from the fact that there is nothing to decorate beyond a pattern of nerves. Prufrock realizes that the evasion will not succeed among people who use language to fix, formulate, and trap people as though they were objects. In the salon discourse is a contest of phrasemakers in which the loser is exposed as less than a person.

The salon offers insulation from the consequences of using language seriously, but in doing so the salon transforms language into an arsenal of aphoristic weapons. The cost of this insulation from reality is too great for Prufrock to pay. The price is nothing less than the reduction of language and selfhood to a parody of quotidian labor. Hannah Arendt's analysis of worldly activity is indispensible here. She notes that the western tradition defines three types of behavior which constitute the Vita Activa: labor, work, and action. The first is quotidian, daily, in need of endless repetition. Labor includes such necessities of nature as cooking, cleaning, farming, and so on. It is cyclical. Work is different in that it produces durable objects. It attempts to create a permanent environment of artificial things that stand in contrast to the tedium of nature. Action, in contrast to both labor and work, is political and social speech which takes for its purpose nothing more than the assertion of the actor's essential self. Action is an attempt to imprint the essence of a temporary individual upon the permanent assemblage we call humanity. It assumes the unfolding through speech of a story that has the private self as its public central figure.

With these distinctions in mind we can see the implications of Prufrock's refusal to join those who reduce action to repetitive labor in an environment of artificial works. The allusion to Hesiod's Works and Days is also clear: the Greek epic of agrarian existence evokes the life of labor that by definition must be locked into the quotidian cycles of nature. In a catalogue of activities for which there is time. Prufrock includes “time for all the works and days of hands that lift and drop a question on your plate.” The life of ancient farmers is superimposed on the high bourgeois salon to drive home the point that an escape from language through stylized chit-chat is an abandonment of the possibility of self-disclosure through action. In his chapter on Petronius in Mimesis, Auerbach makes a valuable point. The Trimalchio episode, he argues, is dominated by the imagery of dailiness, triviality, and the merely repetitive. When the scene is permeated with such things as coffee spoons, neckties, tea, cakes, and ices, the message, Auerbach suggests, is the condition of being confined within one's own time in history, blocked from any sense of contact with tradition. Such images he therefore calls “intrahistorical,” for the sense of intrahistoricity precludes any activity behind the rhythms of birth, copulation, and death.

Prufrock is caught between two painful choices, the streets where serious questions assail him and the salon where no serious questions are permitted. It is a brilliant irony that language is reduced to intrahistorical labor in the salons of the leisure class while language strives to emerge as contemplation in the proletarian environment of “lonely men in shirt sleeves leaning out of windows.” Prufrock, however, cannot appreciate the irony. He can accept neither choice, so he moves into a mental terrain made up of failed fantasies, literature, and myth. Here he can measure himself in contrast to Lazarus, John the Baptist, Hamlet, and the sea-girls of myth. He cannot be Lazarus because there is no life suitable to be brought back to, he escapes the fate of John because he does not commit the social error of getting serious at a tea party, and he is not like Hamlet because he cannot become the selfdisclosing central figure in his own story. He is only “an attendant lord,” a peripheral presence in the psychological misadventures which cloak and conceal his existence.

This series of contrasts leads him first into self-mocking trivializations of questions—“Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”—and then into the poem's final locations, beach and “chambers of the sea.” Realizing that he is blocked from both the language of contemplation and the language of social action, he withdraws from the world altogether and moves into the realm of myth. It is plain that he is fantasizing the refuge of unconsciousness in the womb of an archetypal sea. He is neither the etherized patient nor the pair of ragged claws evoked earlier; he is more like the “irresponsible fetus … submarine and profound” from “Mr. Apollinax.” It is also plain that he still fears language, for the intrusion of human voices will wake and drown him. What is not so apparent, however, is that he has identified mermaids with sirens and reversed the positions of myth and reality. The song of sirens is an irresistible death trap; it lures men to death by drowning with the mirage of safe harbor and home. When Prufrock hears them singing to each other, he does not believe they will sing to him. If we do not recall the deadly effect of siren songs, we are apt to mistake this passage for one of Prufrock's self-fulfilling prophecies of failure with women. Exactly the opposite is the case here; after Ulysses and the argonauts, he is the first man to hear such a song and survive. Only human voices are a deadly peril. The women of the salon have changed places with the sirens of myth.

When seen from the perspective I have offered, Prufrock is something more than the pathetic and ridiculous figure usually discussed by critics as a case history or a symptom of decadence. He has good reason to fear the language patterns available in the world. Those patterns are threats to his life and to ours. He rejects the world—in the manner of the central figures in both satire and hagiography—and reverses the positions of reality and myth. By so doing he creates a new kind of reality. He is certainly not a conventional hero, but because he does not accept what is available, and because he finally tries to invent a fresh alternative, he deserves some measure of respect.