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New Literary History 33.3 (2002) 581-601



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Mind Your Tongue: Autobiography and
New French Lyric Poetry

Elisabeth Cardonne-Arlyck


I

"Let us go then, you and I. . . ." I will propose here that we read the opening line of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 1 as the gesture—simultaneously familiar, ironic, and theatrical—in which a certain twentieth-century poetry, restless heir to Mallarmé, plucks at the sleeve of autobiography, urging it to come along for a companionable foray into ordinary life, in all its personal and social aspects: a life whose very triviality guarantees the authenticity of experience, a life of disenchantment (as Prufrock says of the mermaids, "I do not think that they will sing to me" [LS 126]). The speaker who sets out with a companion "through certain half-deserted streets" (LS 4) to occupy the bourgeois interlude "[b]efore the taking of a toast and tea" (LS 34) is no longer the Baudelairean figure of the solitary dandy who, having dropped his halo into the gutter, can bravely recuperate its loss into allegory. Whereas Baudelaire's dandy can still distinguish himself from the mediocre fellow poet who will retrieve the halo and don it, Prufrock is such a mediocre man among his fellows: "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons" (LS 52).

Autobiography, which, as Eliot's friend Conrad Aiken 2 noted early on, produces a "peculiar" form of "introspective curiosity" in Eliot's poetry, does not imply that the poet and the persona he adopts are identical. Prufrock, by virtue of his name, exemplifies what Käte Hamburger, in The Logic of Literature, terms a "feigned lyric I." 3 The poem contravenes the bipartite system of genres that Hamburger uses to distinguish lyric poetry, in which the subject of the enunciation is identical to the enunciator (Shelley's "I fall upon the thorns of life, I bleed"), from narrative fiction, in which narration and enunciation are separated by a strict limit. "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" thus belongs to the category of "special forms" governed by "the feigned," which also marks first-person narration. Autobiography, too, derives from this category, [End Page 581] despite the fact that the subject of the autobiographical enunciation is in principle "true" rather than "feigned." 4 Structurally, lyric poetry and autobiography are linked by enunciation and its ability to feign. In fact, it is because, as Hamburger points out, we experience the lyric poem as the field of experience of the subject of the enunciation (LL 275), just as we do with autobiography, that the boundary between the two genres is a porous one. Both propose "reality statements," in opposition to the "non-reality" of fiction. But while the historical I that is the subject of autobiographical enunciation is oriented, in Hamburger's terms, "toward the objective truth of the narrated" (LL 313), the lyric I assimilates life's vicissitudes into his field of experience without interference or external confirmation. Hamburger maintains that "the lyric statement does not function in a context of reality . . . it does not inform" (LL 280). However, the fact that a poem does not inform us about a past lived experience does not imply that it lacks a future pragmatic dimension—a "function in reality"—that will be actualized in its reading. Autobiography will enable us to bring this issue more clearly into focus.

In "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," autobiography provides the poet with the means to fashion the mobile mask of his lyric I. Lived experience which, according to Hamburger, the poem transforms into "existential reality," is here manifested in the fluttering movements of the unstable subject. Any attempt to fix subjectivity therefore annihilates the fleeting truth of life as it is lived:

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways? (LS 58-61)

Arguably, this resistance to any definitive pinning...

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