He had already investigated the issues addressed by Badley in Josiah Royce's seminars. But Eliot himself claimed he was a Bergsonian at the time of writing Prufrock.
I have a biography by Peter Ackroyd: "...impossibility of discovering any objective meaning in even the most significant patterns of human behaviour, and this opens an abyss into which all of us might fall. "Meaning" exists in human activities only if those who participate in such activities wish or belive them to have meaning; the "truth" of such things is relative"..."He was also asserting the epistemological value of illusions and hallucinations"
Eliot himself said at a seminar in 1911: "You can't understand me. To understand my point of view you have to believe it first."
Eliot intended after the first unpublished notes on Prufrock, to make philosophy his career. I think it is important to understand his philosophical bent as reflecting in all his poems; as well, his detachment of feeling and his self possession, emotional isolation, endless virginity, and so forth.
The poem shows an entity unable to connect with the external world, unable to exoerience a concrete space and time: an entity which shifts through subjective modes of experience as parts of an ungrasped whole. Prufrock--unable to act, stuck in time which moves and shifts but never connects with the people. Prufrock lost in subjective chaos. Over and over Eliot portrays the speaker separated from the reality of the other--everybody, everything...separated by their subjective fact and wriggling on the wall, and unable to share in meaning: "that is not what I meant at all"
An actual journey? I don't think so. This was an inner journey across time. What is the meaning of it all? Yes, indeed...
"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." |
