The temporality of irony in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, by T. S. Eliot

Abstract

“Time”, as theme and structuring element, is one of the main aspects of T. S. Eliot’s poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. As such, many scholars of Eliot’s work like Nancy Gish and J Hillis Miller have proposed analyses and interpretations of temporality in the poet’s oeuvre and The Love Song in particular. As regards the poem, the critics seem to agree over the form with which time appears in it: as continuity without succession, on the one hand, and as succession without continuity, on the other. In our study, we built on this conclusion and tried to conciliate the temporal aspect of The Love Song with another of its central elements, its irony. Basing our investigation on the ideas of Søren Kierkegaard and Paul De Man, we identified that irony, especially romantic irony, the philosophy that founds modern subjectivity, has its own formulation of temporality. For the ironic subject, present time is boredom or suddenness, that is, continuity without succession and succession without continuity, respectively, and the past, a fiction, while the future is seen as anxiety. Thus, we have tried to identify how the treatment of time in The Love Song corresponds to the “temporality of irony” through a thematic and stylistic analysis of some of the poem’s passages. We concluded through the study that the temporality represented in the work is characterized by the disharmony between continuity and succession of time, and that, in agreement with the aesthetic of romantic irony, time in the poem is composed of boredom and suddenness in the present, absence and mystification of the past, and deferment and anxiety of the future.