Meyrat interprets the line “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” as being about women who are pretentious, when in fact the opposite is true. The poorly educated and silly women of Prufrock’s acquaintance are prattling about the only artist they can name, similar to the way that the modern-day high school student will say that every literary work of art is “like Romeo and Juliet” because it’s the only Shakespeare play they can name.
Meyrat interprets the “tea and cakes and ices” as referring to a supposed “friendzone,” which is ludicrous. There was no “friendzone” in Eliot’s time. A lady was either being courted by, engaged to or married to a man or else she had to keep a cold distance for the sake of her reputation. The Platonic friendships that modern-day conservative men find so perplexing simply didn’t have room to exist in polite society. “Tea and cakes and ices” is another reference to the formality and stuffiness of the society that Prufrock keeps. “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” is the entire couplet. This clearly isn’t referring to any “friendzone.” Rather, Prufrock is fantasizing about breaking out of the chilly formality of society and daring to profess his feelings for a woman clearly– but he chooses not to because of his self-consciousness about his appearance. The stanza ends, “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; I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, And in short, I was afraid.” This stanza has nothing to do with the “friendzone.”
Meyrat continues: “Again, how should an actual woman respond to this? It is doubtful that she would even understand, let alone listen long enough to make it to the end. And the reward for her patience would be that he has not decided anything.” If only Meyrat had read to the end of the poem, he might realize that Prufrock does decide something– he’s going to “wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach” where the mermaids are. He is going to give up and continue admiring female society from afar, accepting that he is no prince but a supporting character, even a fool.
“This myopia and extreme self-consciousness suggests that Prufrock needs a male friend more than a lover,” says Meyrat. “Like many men today, he evidently does not have any outlet for his thoughts nor another man who could give him a reality check. He dwells in his mind as men today dwell online.” No, the poem doesn’t say anything about Prufrock’s need for male relationships. It doesn’t say anything of the kind because that’s not what the poem is about. The poem is about an aging man longing for a relationship with a woman but terrified of the social code surrounding such interactions and of his own physical inadequacy– just like socially disadvantaged males from any number of societies in history might do when longing for the presence of a woman.
It is perfectly valid to compare T. S. Eliot’s culture to our own and draw similarities and differences out of the text, but Meyrat is not drawing anything out of the text. Meyrat is making things up out of whole cloth which are neither implied by, ruled out by, or credibly connected to the text. “Prufrock” is not a poem about the male need for interaction with other males. It’s not a poem about narcissism, which Meyrat doesn’t seem to understand in the least, or any of the other things he says. It’s about something else, and it comes from a society which was like our own in many ways and different from our own in many others. One has to have some basic rudimentary understanding of that society, and his own, in order to analyze a poem in this way. And Meyrat clearly does not. He refuses to undertake any serious literary analysis. He only wants to imagine a parallel between something he decries in modern society and something he’s assigned to the text after quote-mining a few lines. But that parallel does not exist in the text. Whether what he decribes exists in our society is a topic for another discussion.
“Like the majority of young writers in college and high school, Prufrock and his kind cannot craft arguments. They can make observations, crack jokes, ask questions, but they cannot state theses and support them…” says Meyrat, and sadly I don’t think he appreciates the irony.
I wonder if this is the first in a series of conservative literary analyses of Eliot. Perhaps we can look forward to reading “How T. S. Eliot Predicted Crossfit: a Literary Analysis of ‘The Hollow Men,’” or “How T. S. Eliot Predicted Jordan Peterson and Milo Yiannopoulos: a Literary Analysis of ‘The Wasteland.’” We might look forward to essays about how Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer are really Trump and Pence, and Rum Tum Tugger is Obama. Perhaps we can look forward to a piece about Tony Esolen and Old Deuteronomy.
If my entire reading audience isn’t humming airs from Cats right now– well, perhaps you should be. Singing Eliot to the tunes of Andrew Lloyd Weber is a much better use of anybody’s time than reading this essay. Or we could all make good use of our time and re-read T. S. Eliot. Certain among us need a remedial course.
(image via Pixabay)
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