SOURCE: “Games of Consciousness,” in Auctor Ludens: Essays on Plays in Literature, edited by Gerald Guinness and Andrew Hurley, John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1986, pp. 157-69.

[In the following essay, Spariosu examines the “modern crisis of consciousness” in “Prufrock.”]

The arts without intellectual context are vanity.

—T. S. Eliot

In what follows I shall discuss the ways in which Eliot addresses the problematic of consciousness in “Prufrock,” a problematic which has preoccupied thinkers at least since St. Augustine, but which has resurfaced with renewed vigor in our age; in other words, I shall attempt to see Eliot's poem in the intellectual context of modernism, in terms of the so-called “modern crisis of consciousness.”

The poem has the form of a dramatic monologue or, rather, if I may coin the phrase, “interior dialogue,” in which the self of Prufrock appears as divided and disrupted or in a state of despair. Prufrock's “sickness unto death” becomes manifest as he is confronted with imminent action: he is about to go for tea at a lady's house and considers the possibility of propositioning her. However, he does not so much as leave his room, engaging instead in a subtle game of rationalizing his lethargy.¹

The “you” and “I” of the poem, as introduced in the first line, “Let us go then, you and I,”² are the two components of Prufrock's self, that is, the subject which is conscious (the “I”) and the object of which the subject is conscious (the “me” which in the poem becomes “you,” since Prufrock dramatizes himself). I am using here St. Augustine's description of the self (in De Trinitate, Book IX) which also includes a third level of awareness, that of the “I” being conscious of being conscious. This level of awareness, however, is only partially achieved by Prufrock, who, after a brief moment of recognition, relapses into self-delusion, and starts “cheering himself up.”

From the very opening of the first section it is obvious that Prufrock is reluctant to act, though he tries to convince himself he is not and, in this sense, the entire poem can be read as a modern equivalent of consolatio. The self-persuasive “then” in the first line, the fact that “Let us go” is repeated three times, his “Oh, do not ask what is it,” and, later, the images of sordid love, suggested by “one-night cheap hotels” and “sawdust restaurants with oyster shells,” all point to this action-shyness. Prufrock's unwillingness to leave his room controls the particular kind of images or “objective correlatives” that take shape in his mind. The image of “the evening spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table” establishes the mood of Prufrock's monologue. This mood can best be described, I think, as lethargic, being somewhat similar to the first part of Keats' “Ode to a Nightingale.”³ The streets are “like tedious arguments” leading insidiously to “an overwhelming question” (italics mine), therefore, they appear as another “objective correlative” of Prufrock's resistance to action. The need to act here arises from inside him, being his “project”; but in his mind it takes the objective form of the streets “leading” him into action and as such the inner drive becomes something imposed from outside, something that should be resisted. This is a characteristic instance of how Prufrock, throughout his monologue, devises an elaborate game of self-defense against what he perceives as a menacing “outside world,” but what is ultimately a mere projection of his divided self. “Let us go and make our visit,” which seems more resolute (but is in fact only a means of evading the “overwhelming question”) is followed by a “visualization” which can be seen as another example of self-deception, disguised as self-defense:

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo. (lines 13-14)(4)

This scene which Prufrock imagines taking place at his lady's house appears distasteful to him, and as such, it provides another “rationalization” for inaction. His self-consciousness takes here a somewhat aggressive form as he looks down on the women who are prattling fashionably about Michelangelo, presumably thrilled with his “manhood.” But also, Prufrock implicitly deprecates “beefy” Michelangelo in the sense that he “looks down” on what he thinks must be an ideal in the eyes of women, unconsciously setting up against it another “ideal,” that is, himself. As we shall see later, Prufrock constantly contrasts himself, playfully, to such heroic characters as Michelangelo, Hamlet and St. John the Baptist, presenting himself as an anti-hero (or a mock-hero), but his motive is again “to take in himself.”

Prufrock seeks to escape even further the “necessity” of his visit by taking refuge in the palliative image of the soporific fog, appropriately associated with a big, lazy, yellow cat which, having made its rounds about the house, curls up to sleep:

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house and fell asleep. (15-22)

The fog “curled” about the house becomes a sort of protective cotton-soft wall between Prufrock and the outside world. The ambiguous use of the present and the past tenses here indicates (besides the fact that he has not left his room) that he projects himself into the future so that he can contemplate the present as something already past (note that he is “talking” of the October night though we are only at dusk; cf. “And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!” later in the poem). He does this with the same purpose of evading action, for if the present has become the past, he has transcended the necessity of making a decision. Unwilling to recognize this projection into the future as self-delusion (i.e., an attempt to escape necessity), Prufrock pretends to use “time” as an argument for action, but soon turns it into an argument for inaction:

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. (23-34)

“And indeed there will be time” is made by Prufrock to sound as if it were the logical conclusion derived from the previous section, while, in reality, the opposite would be the case. Returning to the present (where the smoke still rubs its back cat-like upon the window-panes, etc.), Prufrock pretends that everything is all right, that “indeed” there will still be time for him to make his visit and that there is no harm in a little playful day-dreaming or in “visions” and “revisions” before the decisive moment comes. The repetition of “there will be time” in line 26 indicates Prufrock's impatience at having to deal with time, marking the change of the argument for action into one for inaction. The taking of toast and tea is facetiously associated here with communion, which is an action, therefore a form of self-commitment. By associating communion with tea and toast, Prufrock minimalizes the significance of his would-be act by the same mechanism of self-defense he had employed in the couplet “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo,” which he repeats here again, quite appropriately.

But the next “And indeed there will be time” (line 38) is itself a complete “revision”:

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

(38-49)

Here time becomes a sinister element, and from this point forward Prufrock is no longer pretending that he is going to make his visit.

Prufrock extends the casual meaning of “having time” into the generalization of time as an inescapable finite of human existence (time as death or the “eternal Footman”), and as such he uses it as an argument against action. This is the old Ovidian theme of tempus edax rerum (present in the Elizabethan sonnet and in Marvell's “To His Coy Mistress,” the poem Prufrock alludes to later in his monologue) which is cleverly used by Prufrock as an inverted argument not for carpe diem (a suasio urging to action) but against it.

The act of “turning back” and “descending the stair” is given here, by Prufrock, a symbolic meaning, being man's journey in time. Seeing himself as reaching “nel mazzo del camin di nostra vita”; (symbolized in the poem by the top of the stairs) Prufrock visualizes his descent towards death so that the literal turning back and descending of the stairs becomes, by a trick of reasoning, a “necessity.” The logical outcome of Prufrock's argument is that since the end of action or movement in time is inaction, lack of movement, or death, and since “in a minute there is time / for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse,” why should one act at all, why “dare disturb the universe”?

Appropriately enough, when there is time for him to descend the stair of life, young Prufrock “becomes” a middle-aged man with a bald spot in the middle of his hair. This whole section is again a projection in time, wherein Prufrock playfully visualizes the future as something already “past,” thus evading the present.

The parenthetical remarks in the quotation above offer further “good” arguments against action, which would mean imminent collision with the other. Sartre's theory of self and other is by no means irrelevant here. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre, largely following Heidegger, makes three ontological distinctions: being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and the Other.⁵ Being-in-itself is being complete in itself, without any potentiality or movement. Being-for-itself is presence to itself or consciousness which implies a separation or “fall” from being-in-itself. With the Other, being-for-itself finds itself in the presence of others and experiences itself as an “object-to-be-looked-at.” Through this “look” the Other annihilates my world, by drawing me into his orbit and depriving me of my possibilities. Beneath the Other's look I experience my alienation. This is precisely what Prufrock is talking about in lines 56-62:

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
And when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
                                        And how should I presume?

I can affirm my freedom only by dissociating myself from the Other, but this is impossible, for the existence of the Other is the only proof of my own existence. I can affirm myself only by transforming the Other into an object and the Other can affirm himself only by doing the same thing to me. It is this irreducible agon with the Other that Prufrock calls “presumption” and uses, in his consolatio, as a further argument against action.

In his projection as a middle-aged man, Prufrock has already “experienced” that which he is going to experience; he has already known all the “decisions” and “revisions”:

And I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons:
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
                                        So how should I presume? (50-55)

Likewise, he has already “experienced” love, which here is associated characteristically with the presumably distasteful image of a braceleted, bare, white arm appearing “downed with light brown hair” in the lamplight. By this impersonation Prufrock tries ironically to evade necessity by a retreat from possibility and this results (as he himself seems to be aware), in a complete denial of the self:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. (74-75)

At the same time, Prufrock tries, paradoxically, to evade the present or necessity by finding refuge in it. He argues as to the uselessness of action on the basis of his “past” experience, which becomes a sort of fate which determines his future. Thus, Prufrock ultimately seeks refuge in fatalism or determinism. He sacrifices his self to finitude, to the external circumstances of his environment—in other words, he “measures out” his life “with coffee spoons.”

The prevailing mood of this section is boredom or ennui. Since Prufrock denies his self-actualization he is confronted, like “the hollow men,” with emptiness or nothingness. So even if he were to “presume” to propose love, Prufrock argues, what could he say to the lady: That he has “gone at dusk through narrow streets / And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes / Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?” In other words, should he start his suasio by invoking not the tempus edax rerum but the ennui or the emptiness of life? But this would be useless since love, like the tea party, to Prufrock seems only another means of distraction or diversion which, once consummated, leaves the soul as empty as before. With Prufrock the classical rhetoric of action becomes a rhetoric of inaction and his so-called “love-song” turns into an unequivocal rejection of love. “And would it have been worth it, after all, / … / To have squeezed the universe into a ball.” (89; 95) This is a sour reply to Marvell's gleeful entreaty to his coy mistress:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Thorough the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.(6)

Eliot's comment on Romeo and Juliet is relevant to what Marvell implies here and also to the kind of character Prufrock is: “In Romeo and Juliet the profounder dramatist shows his lovers melting into unconsciousness of their isolated self, shows the human soul in the process of forgetting itself.”⁷ Prufrock's problem is that he can not “forget himself” though he aspires towards it, but in the wrong way, wishing to be no more than “a pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.” This image is the objective correlative of a sort of emotional climax in Prufrock's monologue, being his complete denial of the use of consciousness. It is the logical outcome of the kind of despair he seems to be in, the “despair of weakness” or the “unwillingness to be one's self”:⁸ Prufrock eschews once more the “overwhelming question,” taking refuge in the image of the cat-like afternoon sleeping peacefully, “smoothed by long fingers.” But Prufrock does not let himself be “pinned down” quite so easily, because, a little later, he describes the afternoon as “malingering beside you and me,” and admits of being afraid at having seen “the greatness of his moment flicker,” thus showing that he is fully aware of his predicament. He turns his “despair of weakness” into “despair of defiance,” because, as Kierkegaard points out, it is ultimately “consciousness which makes the difference between despair and despair.” If the self

becomes conscious of the reason why it does not want to be itself, then the case is altered, then defiance is present, for then it is precisely because of this a man is despairingly determined to be himself. … First comes despair over the earthly or something earthly, then despair over oneself about the eternal. Then comes defiance, which really is despair by the aid of the eternal, the despairing abuse of the eternal in the self to the point of being despairingly determined to be oneself. … In this form of despair there is now a mounting consciousness of the self, and hence greater consciousness of what despair is and of the fact that one's condition is that of despair. Here despair is conscious of itself as a deed, it does not come from without as a suffering under the pressure of circumstances, it comes directly from the self. And, so after all, defiance is a new qualification added to despair over one's weakness.⁹

This is precisely the reason for Prufrock's defiant attitude throughout the last section of his “love song,” once he has seen “the greatness of his moment flicker” and “the eternal Footman hold his coat, and snicker.”

But before proceeding with the analysis of the last section, let us turn for a moment to the epigraph and examine its relevance to the situation in the poem. As critics have pointed out, the epigraph is taken from Dante's Inferno (XXVII, 61-66). It is the reply of Guido da Montefeltro, tormented in the eighth circle of Hell for the sin of perverting human reason by guile, to Dante's question about who he is:

If I thought my answer were to one who ever could return
to the world, this flame should shake no more;
But since none ever did return alive from this depth,
if what I hear be true, without fear of infamy I answer thee.

Montefeltro's situation is relevant to Prufrock's in several ways. For one thing, Prufrock perverts human reason by guile which, just like Montefeltro, he ultimately practices upon himself.¹⁰ Also, Prufrock, since he is addressing his own self, speaks “senza tema d'infamia,” without fear of being overheard and judged by the outside world, by the Other. But there are further, less obvious, implications in the similarity of their situations. In Little Gidding the speaker remarks about prayer in words which also remind us of the Inferno:

                                                   … And prayer is more
Than an order of words, the conscious occupation
Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.
And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language
                                                  of the living.(11)

I think the key words here are “communication” and “language.” Being dead, Montefeltro can speak to Dante whom he supposes also to be dead. In a sense, Prufrock, like the “hollow men,” is dead, too. By refusing to act, he retreats from possibility and self-actualization, therefore from existence itself. Moreover, he “communicates” with the “language” of the dead, that is, with no language. We do not learn of his situation from him but through him. He, too, lives in hell, being tormented by self-consciousness. I use the word “self-consciousness” primarily in the sense of “being aware of oneself,” though the secondary sense is also relevant here: being aware of oneself impedes self-expression, whether it is speech or action. Prufrock's problem is also one of self-expression, including the linguistic level (note, for instance, his “That is not what I meant at all! / That is not it, at all”, or “it is impossible to say just what I mean!”). In hell, which is the realm of despair, consciousness becomes perverted, stinging itself to death like a scorpion. Prufrock has no speech for what he is trying to say because his thought reaches a point where it annihilates itself. For Eliot, as for Kierkegaard, human consciousness is a reflexive act, and as such it must be put to use, it must reflect something other than itself. And this other ultimately relates to God which is precisely consciousness free of necessity or finitude. Kierkegaard's description of the predicament of modern human consciousness which attempts to set itself up as infinitude, as origin of all things, but ends up as despairing finitude, applies word for word to Prufrock's own situation. In this light it is only appropriate that Prufrock should want to become a “pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.”¹² However, ironically, Prufrock does not understand the full implication of this “recognition.” From this point forward, he tries to forget himself, but in the wrong way. Dismissing the kind of despair in which, according to Kierkegaard (and St. Augustine), by the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to gain itself (a recurrent theme in Eliot's later poetry), Prufrock plunges into the kind of despair in which, on the contrary, the self is not willing to begin by losing itself but wills to be itself. So Prufrock starts to “cheer himself up,” a process that continues to the last line of his monologue. I think that what Eliot says about Othello in his essay on “Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca” applies to Prufrock as well:

Othello is cheering himself up. He is endeavoring to escape reality, he has ceased to think about Desdemona and is thinking about himself. Othello succeeds in turning himself into a pathetic figure, by adopting an aesthetic rather than a moral attitude, dramatising himself against his environment … the human motive is primarily to take in himself?¹³

Indeed Prufrock suffers from the same kind of bovarysme, defined by Eliot as the “human will to see things as they are not.”¹⁴ His game of cheering himself up differs, though, from that of Othello. Appropriately, Othello cheers himself up with the rhetoric of the heroic. No less appropriately, Prufrock uses the playful rhetoric of the mock-heroic, or that of the eiron:¹⁵

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald)
                              brought in upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here's no great matter; (82-85)

Adopting the characteristic self-effacing attitude of the eiron, he says that though he has seen into his future as a middle-aged bachelor victimized by women, “here's no great matter,” for he is hardly a prophet who, by his visionary gifts, acquires heroic stature. The specific reference to St. John the Baptist carries a further implication related to the parenthetical remarks earlier in the poem (“How his hair is growing thin,” etc.) and therefore to the theory of Autrui. Prufrock is symbolically (as St. John the Baptist was literally) “murdered” through women who “pin him down,” “wriggling on the wall.” By their supposed unwillingness to “sing” to him, that is, make love to him, they represent the Other or the concealed death of his possibilities.¹⁶

Prufrock is a special type of eiron, a sort of “bully of humility.” An unmodified type of eiron pretends to be less than he is. Prufrock pretends to be less than he thinks he is (and so, ironically, he turns into an alazon). This becomes obvious when he compares himself (unfavorably) with Hamlet but nevertheless eventually ascribes to himself the role of the Fool, a much respected type of eiron:

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool. (115-123)

Prufrock derives a great deal of rhetorical delight from seeing himself as playing second fiddle, but he still has the vanity to cast himself in the role of the jester. He wants to have his cake and eat it too, and in this respect he can also be compared to Guido da Montefeltro: they are both in “bad faith,” in the full sense of that phrase.

The character of Prufrock has been described as tragic. I do not think this is the case, as the tone of the poem works against such an interpretation. Perhaps Eliot himself supplies us with an answer here. In his essay on “Rhetoric and ‘Poetic Drama’” he states that “the really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare occurs in situations where a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light.” Prufrock has, too, what Eliot calls a “dramatic sense,” “a sense which is almost a sense of humor for when anyone is conscious of himself as acting, something like a sense of humor is present.”¹⁷ By virtue of his “dramatic sense,” Prufrock belongs in the gallery of Romantic heroes of the Cyrano de Bergerac or Laforguian type, verging more on the comic than on the tragic. But one should nevertheless point out that, despite his sense of humor and his intellectual games, Prufrock cannot be described as truly playful; he hardly ever forgets himself, taking himself far too seriously, even in his self-deprecating moods. In other words, he lacks that quality of sprezzatura that his Renaissance and Baroque models display so brilliantly. And it is perhaps this quality itself that generally separates a Romantic or Modernist “self-conscious” hero such as Prufrock from its Renaissance or Baroque counterpart.¹⁸

The last stanza of the poem seems to be another dramatic recognition, but it is again a false one:

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (134-136)

The syntax here is again ambiguous, like Prufrock's divided mind. The normal sequence of tenses would have been as follows: “We lingered in the chambers of the sea till human voices woke us and we drowned.” Thus read, the sentence would have implied that “we” (Prufrock's self) “drowned” because “we” “lingered by the chambers of the sea” (in the world of dreams). By using the present tense, Prufrock completely turns around the relation of causality in the sentence, implying that “we drown” because “human voices wake us.” Note that in this case “we” and “us” no longer represent the two components of Prufrock's self, but become impersonal, sententious. Changing his mind half-way through the sentence, Prufrock actually ends up protesting against the human voices (the outside world), viewed as the Other, as la mort cachée de possibilités. Thus, by a last twist of rhetoric, he “chooses” to deceive himself to the very end.

By remaining blind to the double nature of human consciousness, Prufrock throws himself into a double-bind, denying existence itself and becoming a “hollow man.” Viewed in this light, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” prefigures the ampler existentialist descriptions of the predicament of modern consciousness in The Waste Land, “The Hollow Men” and, in part, the Ariel Poems. This predicament will eventually find its resolution in Ash Wednesday and The Four Quartets, and Eliot will follow a spiritual path similar not only to that of Kierkegaard but also to that of Heidegger, where the deceitful game of consciousness finally dissolves into Being or into the eternal, ecstatic play of the world.¹⁹

Notes

1. Regarding the “plot” of the poem, critics usually refer us to Henry James' story, “Crapy Cornelia” (1909) in which a middle-aged bachelor, White Mason, visits a young widow named Cornelia Washington in order to propose marriage but changes his mind, because of differences in their ages and temperaments. However, there is nothing in the poem that might indicate that matrimony is on Prufrock's mind. I raise this seemingly trivial point because it is of some consequence in the light of the present interpretation. If Prufrock intended to propose nothing less than marriage, the mood of the poem would be inappropriate. His inability to choose would have had a well-grounded psychological support inasmuch as even staunch spirits have been known to shy away from matrimony. But as Prufrock himself says, “here's no great matter.” Moreover, as will become apparent in this essay, I take seriously Eliot's statement, made casually in one of his lectures (as Hugh Kenner reports in “Bradley in T. S. Eliot,” A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Hugh Kenner, New York, 1962), that Prufrock is a young man and not a middle-aged bachelor.

2. “You and me” would have been correct in a strictly grammatical sense. Actually, Prufrock's grammar is rather erratic throughout the poem. This linguistic imprecision or vagueness, besides rendering the monologue “plausible,” testifies to Prufrock's chronic incapacity to “make up his mind.”

3. Despite the obvious dissimilarity between the two poems as far as “poetic diction” is concerned, I think that their themes are closely related. The speaker in Keats' poem, whose sense is “pained” by “drowsy numbness” (a good phrase to use in describing Prufrock's own state) is sinking “Lethewards,” i.e., he seeks to escape from “the fever” and the “fret” of “reality” into the realm of dreams. And he achieves this through “fancy.” Towards the end the speaker becomes “undeceived” for a moment, the word “forlorn” acting like a “bell” to toll him back to his “sole self.” He seems to be able to transcend his fantasy by being aware that “the fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do, deceiving elf” (cf. “We have lingered in the chambers of the sea,” etc.). However, the poem ends like “Prufrock” on an ambiguous note, a sort of reluctant acknowledgement of the “on-handedness” of the outside world, but seen negatively as a limiting factor of the self.

4. All citations from “Prufrock” will be from T. S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc.: New York, 1958).

5. For the ensuing discussion see J. P. Sartre: Being and Nothingness, an Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes, (New York, 1956), Part III, Chapter 7, “The Look,” pp. 252-300.

6. Andrew Marvell, “To his Coy Mistress,” Seven Centuries of Verse, ed. A. J. Smith (New York, 1957), p. 202. Here Prufrock has lost his game sense and is taking himself too seriously. For Marvell's playful spirit in this poem, see Frank J. Warnke's essay on “Amorous Agon, Erotic Flyting.”

7. Selected Essays (New York, 1932), p. 29.

8. In his book, The Sickness unto Death (trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press: Princeton, N. J., 1954), Kierkegaard elaborates a phenomenology of despair which I have used as background for the discussion of “Prufrock” in this essay. According to Kierkegaard, despair is a disruption or disproportion of the two components of the self. The two components are necessity (the determinant of self as having been) and possibility (the determinant of self as being not yet). There are two primary forms of despair: the despair of not willing to be one's self (the despair of weakness) and the despair of desperately willing to be one's self (defiant despair). In the “despair of weakness,” necessity outruns possibility. In the “defiant despair,” possibility absorbs necessity and finitude is lost in a continuous striving after infinity. Both these types of despair have in common the desire of the self to get rid of itself.

9. Sickness unto Death, p. 201.

10. Guido da Montefeltro, according to his own account in Canto XXVII, was a counselor to Pope Boniface VIII who asked him for advice about how to deal with an enemy. In return for the Pope's promise of divine absolution for his evil counsel, Montefeltro advised lunga promessa con l'attender corto (long promise and short observance) not realizing until it was too late that the Pope had employed the very same trick in his own case. Montefeltro also attempted to cheat his way into heaven by turning from a soldier into a Franciscan monk just before his death. Despite St. Francis' plea in his favor, “one of the Black Angels” won the argument and seized his soul, with the ironic comment that he was as good a “logician” (sophist) as Montefeltro was. Prufrock also seems to be a perverted logician or sophist who drives himself into the double-bind of (in)action (all inaction is already a kind of action) and thus ends up in a hell of his own making.

11. Complete Poems and Plays, p. 139.

12. At this point I should remark that there were at least two (logically opposed) concepts of consciousness available at the beginning of the twentieth century. On the one hand there was consciousness as part of the universal spirit (Hegel and the whole Hegelian tradition, including Kierkegaard) and, on the other hand, consciousness as an instrument of the will and, consequently, as a historical, non-transcendental category (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc.). Eliot's concept is clearly the Hegelian one. For a useful review of some of the contemporary theories of consciousness see Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (Princeton, 1978). Jaynes' own theory is a provocative combination of the two main traditional views. I may add that what we have come to call “modern consciousness” or what Eliot himself calls “dissociation of sensibility” is placed by various thinkers at various historical moments, ranging from the “Fall of Man” to the Renaissance, the eighteenth, or even the twentieth century. For a full discussion of the theoretical implications of the “fiction of the golden age” (Vaihinger) for modernism, see my review-article on “Matei Calinescu: Faces of Modernity,”; in Comparative Literature, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Winter 1981), pp. 79-83.

13. Selected Essays, p. 111.

14. Ibid., p. 111.

15. I use here Northrop Frye's classification of comic characters in Anatomy of Criticism (New York, 1969), pp. 171-173.

16. Here Prufrock also alludes, in all likelihood, to the Sirens episode in the Odyssey, again “measuring” himself up against a traditional hero. The allusion gains further significance from the fact that Dante himself contrasts Ulysses to Guido da Montefeltro. For an excellent discussion of Ulysses as a heroic figure in Canto XXVI of the Inferno, see Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert (Princeton, 1979), Chapter II, “Rhetoric and History.”

17. Selected Essays. p. 26.

18. Gerald Guinness makes a somewhat similar point in this section, when he presents Donne as a self-conscious but playful virtuoso. If Donne is “playing for life,” surely Prufrock is playing for death, thereby turning into a “hollow man.”

19. In the present essay I have examined only those aspects of the problematic of consciousness which appear in young Eliot and I have tried to show that Eliot saw this problematic in terms similar to those of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and, to some extent, Sartre. Another essay would be needed to look at Eliot's solution to this question in his later work, where, like Heidegger, he advocates a melting of the self into the ecstatic movement of the world or the play of Being. In fact one may argue that in his poetry Eliot provides a link between Kierkegaard and twentieth-century existentialist thought. However, this does not necessarily imply that Eliot was “influenced” by or consciously used existentialist concepts, nor, conversely, that Heidegger or Sartre were “influenced” by Eliot. On the contrary, the main thesis underlying my study is that “Prufrock” and Eliot's work in general can be seen as an instance of how literature may go hand in hand with philosophy and other fields of knowledge in creating a certain cultural paradigm in the Western world. For further elaboration of this thesis as well as for a full presentation of the concept(s) of play that I have employed in this essay, see my book Literature, Mimesis and Play (Tubingen, 1982).