Quotes Tagged "modernism"
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,â whatever else it might be, seems to be an investigation into the possibility of durational being, which Bergson had described as âthe form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former states.â The succession that Bergson opposes to vitality is the realm in which the morbid Prufrock tries to imagine speaking Andrew Marvellâs line, âNow let us sport us while we may,â but then falls back on his indecision, his failure to pose his overwhelming question, and his inability to sing his love. Prufrockâs problems are shown to be symptoms of the form of time in which desire for youth runs defiantly against the remorselessness of aging, snapping the present in two. The âsilent seasâ that might bring relief from currents and countercurrents of time turn out to be like the troubling one that figures in Hamletâs overwhelming question: âTo be or not to be: that is the question: / Whether âtis nobler in the mind to suffer / The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, / Or to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them.â Prufrock understands but is unable to admit the ontological force of the question: the âwhips and scorns of timeâ that threaten to reverse all his âdecisions and revisionsâ make him wish to be merely âa pair of ragged claws / Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.â That synecdochic figure is as much an anachronous peripeteia for Prufrock as it is for Polonius when Hamlet taunts him: âyou yourself, sir, should be as old as I am if, like a crab, you could go backwards.