Prufrock's Stream of Consciousness

98 Pages·2011·3.43 MB·English

by  R. Anne Jamieson

PRUFROCK'S STRE.AM 'OF CONSCIOUSNESS
PRUFROCK S STRE.AM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
t
By
R •.A NNE JAMIESON. B • .A •
.A Thesis
Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies
in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements
for the Degree
Master of .Arts
McMaster University
August 1975
MASTER OF ARTS (1975) McMASTER UNIVERSITY
(English) Hamilton, Ontario
TITLE: Prufrock's Stream of consciousness
AUTHOR: R. Anne Jamieson, B.A. (University of Wales)
SUPERVISOR: Dr N. Rosenblood
NUMBER OF PAGES: v, 92
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I should like to thank my supervisor, Dr Norman
Rosenblood, whose help and guidance in the preparation of
this thesis were invaluable.
iii
OF CONTENTS
T~BLE
I INTRODUCTION 1
II : PRUFROCK: THE CONNECTIVE TISSUE 20
III PRUFROCK: THE THEMES .53
IV PRUFROCK: THE STRUCTURE 72
V CONCLUSION 86
91
BIBLIOGR~PHY
1v
....
...... , ;
EXPLAN.ATORY NOTE
\'ihere an asterisk (*) appears in the script it
denotes a point originally suggested by Dr Ng Rosenbloodo
'J ••'
.: "
. ...
"
v
I
INTRODUCTION
Much T.S. Eliot criticism of the last decade or so
has been moving toward the assertion that, in "The Love Song
of J. ,Alfred Prufrock" and The ~'laste Land, and perhaps in
most of his earlier poetry, Eliot's primary aim was an expl-
oration of consciousness. And one critic, at least, has
claimed that to achieve this end Eliot adapted the 'stream
of-consciousness' techniques of modern fiction to poetry.
Anne Bo1gan, in 1973, claimed that what The Waste
Land "aspired to be" was "a neo-epic of the interior life
1
an epic, that is, mounted upon Ie pa;ysage And,
int~rieur."
further, she held that "what Eliot set out to write, and what
The \Vasts Land was generically 'aiming to be' was an extended
--- 2
-interior monologue." Ms Bolgan considers that not only were
Eliot's ideas about consciousness born from his study of the
philosophy of F.H. Bradley, but that the form in which he ex
plored it conformed to Bradley's dialectical, post-Hegelian
1
What the Thtl...'1derRea11y Said (Montreal and London:
p.
McGill-Queens, 1973), 13'.
2
lli£.,
P .52.
G
1
2
method. This method enables ideas to be "s;enerated" (italics
in original) rather than expounded or reflected upon, she says,
since, in the "collision" of two "particles", a "third some-
thing" 1s generated which is greater than the sum of the two
particles:
To see anything "in relation", therefore, is not
only to see it more clearly, but also to see "more"
of it -- the "more" released by the relation itself.
When, for example, the poet-protagonist of The Waste
Land sees the typist "in relation" to Goldsmith's
earlier herOine, he not only sees her in a different
light; he sees her as well in a light which illumines
what she is more clearly. a consequence,
reall~ ~s
his actual experience of her is both widened and
deepened at the same time, and so too is his exper
ience of Goldsmith's heroine.]
Hugh Kenner, in 1959. was one of the first to acknowledge
Eliot's debt to Bradley, but he pOinted out a different eff
ect of that debt:
••• to produce the quality of [Bradley's concept ofj
irunediate experience, there is exacted of verse a bl-"
ending suavity, not an assured rattle of subjects and
predicates, nor images standing in explicable analogy
to one another • • • [lie] have participles and relat
ive clauses related to nothing, the gestures of verbs
rather than their commitments, syntax not abolished
but anaesthetized What syntax will specify the
0 • •
infusion, into your experience of reading this book
now, the place iU which you are half-aware of your
self reading it?
The final sentence of this quotation reveals Kenner's belief
that Eliot was concerned to render the inclusiveness of con-
J
Anne Bolgan, p. 140.
4
The InVisible Poet (New York: Ivan Obolensky, 1959),
pp. 49-500
3
sciousnessJ a whole which must include the thing perceived as
well as the perceiver, for, as Eliot stated in his doctoral
5
thesis, "In feeling the subject end object are one." Kenn-
er's use of the word "anaesthetized" is significant, too, when
set against his pronouncement that:
What "Prufrock" is, is the name of a possible zone of
consciousness ••• ; no more than that; certainly not
a person • • • Like the thing you look at when you
raise your eyes from this page, he is the center of a
field of consciousness, rather yours than his: a foc
ussing of the reader's attention, in a world made up
not of cows end stones but gf literary 'effects' and
memories prompted by words.
That syntax is "anaesthetized" to generate a fifield of consc
iousness" is curiously suggested by the opening lines of "Pru-
frock" :
Let us go then,you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table • • •
Eliot's method of 'anaesthetizing' his syntax will be examined
later.
With reference to the final sentence of my first quot
ation from Kenner, a statement by Aldous Huxley in "The Doors
of Perception" comes to mind:
• • • each one of us is potentially Mind at Large.
But in so far as we are animals, our business is at
all costs to survive. To make biological survival
possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through
.~
Cited by Hugh Kenner, p. 49.
6
Ibid., pp. 40-41.
4
the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system.
What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle
of the kind of consciousness which will help us to
stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.
To formulate and express the contents of this reduc
ed awareness, man has invented and endlessly elabor
ated those symbol-systems and lmplici"t; philosophies
which we call languages."f
What Huxley is, in fact, describing in his own graphic, phil
osophical terms is the structure of the human psyche. His
"reducing valve" would elsewhere be called the repressing
agenoy of the super-ego, and his "reduced awareness", the
consciousness of the ego. William James expressed the
SB~e
idea thus:
, • • the mind is at every stage a theatre of sim
ultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in
the comparison of these with each other, the selec
tion of some, and the suppression of the rest by 8
the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention.
In the early stages of his poetic career, I submit, Eliot wa.s
concerned not so much with extending this "reduced awareness"
as with representing it in language; (although, as F.O. Matt
iason has pointed out, Eliot always believed, apparently in
opposition with Huxley, that ."every vital development in lang-
9
uage is a development in feeling as well.") Later in his
7
in The Nature of Human Consciousness, ed. R.E. Orns
te1n (san Francisco: Freeman, 1973), p. 108.
8
"stream of Consciousness", in The Nature of Human
ponso10usness, ed. R.E. Ornstein, p. 165.
9
The Achievement of TIS. Eliot (Oxford University,
p:
1958), 86.