Nicholas Mayer on T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Nicholas Mayer brings much careful research to his paper "Catalyzing Prufrock," but one gets the sense that he ended up with his interpretation because he went into the poem with it tucked into one of his interior pockets. Not that there's anything wrong with that, as long as you can make the interpretation stick -- which Mayer is almost skillful enough to do here.

Mayer's essential point is that the published version of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and our knowledge that it at one time included a section called the "Pervigilium," allows us to see how Eliot's "depersonalization theory" of poetic creation works. In this case, the Pervigilium included too much immediate history or emotion to be in the finished poem. Mayer derives this point from examining Eliot's response to F. H. Bradley's philosophy. Very quickly (and according to Mayer), Bradley has two stages to his metaphysical theory. First, there is the act of immediate experience or feeling. This is undifferentiated and non-relational. The second stage is the mind's work on the material of the immediate experience.

Mayer argues that Eliot's poetic method introduces a third stage: the artist's transformation of emotion into art. Mayer explains that Eliot is suspicious of "sincere language" to express emotion. That is, Eliot does not authorize the self who emerges from Bradley's second stage a direct way to express himself. Instead, Mayer sees Prufrock the character as the second stage, and "Prufrock" the poem as Eliot's third stage. It is the impossibility of representing Prufrock's sincere emotion that leads to the "Prufrock" poem (which seems, paradoxically, to achieve a sort of emotional intensity because of this very depersonalizing maneuver).

What I like about Mayer's essay is that it points to something I've felt is obvious about modernist literature but not mentioned enough: the modernists were incredibly self-ridiculing. The method that Mayer describes above involves poking itty-bitty holes into the serious ways we once felt. The mix of high and low does not raise the low but reorients the high. A good example of this is when teenagers have glorious visions of their immortality or believe they are going to play in the NBA (or become rock stars); the only way to get over this is to scoff a bit at that silly (but earnest) earlier self. In some sense, that earlier self needs to be purged in order to complete the mature human being. This seems to be the argument Mayer makes in his essay about the failure of sincere language.

Where the essay suffers, however, is that it doesn't deliver on the promise it offers by raising Bradleyan metaphysics. I believe Eliot's notion of depersonalization relates to Bradley's metaphysics in a more complicated way than Mayer suggests. Mayer's characterization of Eliot's "third stage" is not primarily metaphysical. Instead, it presents a commonplace understanding taken from Eliot's criticism. But Mayer doesn't ask What IS a self as a result of this third stage, the artistic endeavor? Surely Eliot must have had a working notion of his own answer to this question as he wrote his poetry and criticism...but what is it? I regret to say I don't have an answer yet, but I will surely be attempting to form one as I continue reading.