"Till human voices wake us"
Why Eliot's Prufrock needs to state the human
To paraphrase the philosopher Stanley Cavell, nothing is so human as the denial of the human. “For of course there are those for whom the denial of the human is the human,” he says in his Shakespeare book, Disowning Knowledge (1987).
In his collection Primitive (1978), The Objectivist and socialist poet George Oppen rewrote the famous concluding lines of Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1917) as “ ’till other voices wake / us or we drown.”
By replacing “human” with “other,” Oppen may have thought he was doing something like correcting a redundancy — a form of logical as well as ethical error — in Prufrock’s strange need to personify the voice as “human” in the poem’s last breath. Perhaps, then, Eliot through his speaker was including the knowledge that poetic voice is not a human register of voice? (And indeed it is not, whether taken from the prospective of the pragmatics of communication theory or from almost any vantage you could think of in “Lyric Theory.”)
Though his own poetry, as John Wilkinson points out, is almost exclusively written in a stony, sculptural, glassy, hieratic voice — and is full of an intense expression of the need for sociality, with a striking absence of any people — Oppen doggedly sought what he called “actualness” from the writing of poetry. He profoundly mistrusted any kind of fiction as a means of disclosure.
But in addition to his rejection of fictional voices, Oppen also implicitly seems to be conveying something like “other (human) voices”: meaning, under the poetic economy of emphasis with elision, both words are to be understood but “other” deserves expression. There is a “this” voice, that of the poem’s authentic and distinct individuality, and then of course there are “other” voices, just as there is a real world out there for poetry to bear wonderful witness.
As I hear it (and it would be impossible not to read in Oppen’s activist politics here), this choice also make the human “other” for Oppen a relationship fundamentally of solidarity over separateness. For in this revised line Oppen locates an “other” (connected and same) that is only tragically mistaken as the “other” (divided, lost, abjected, dominated, idealized, repressed, radically different). As a consequence, Oppen’s formulation, while it appears to be sharply critical of Eliot’s, feels non-tragic.
Despite the merely conditional grammar of “ ‘till,” one imagines an awakening — in our times of 2021, a wokeness, even? — as the decided condition at the outcome of the lyric in Primitive, and a drowning as the horribly vivid outcome of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”
But there is reason I believe to go on hearing the underwater voices of Eliot’s poetry as experienced under the weird aspect of needing to state the human. (Remember, Prufrock longs to become the “pair of ragged claws” of a crab moving “across the floors of silent seas.”) The condition of consciousness and voice at the end of “Prufrock” is both awakened and drowning. It is written as if in a state of sudden, mortal, and totally unforgettable realization. Eliot would seize it again as painfully salvific, “The awful daring of a moment's surrender/ Which an age of prudence can never retract,” in the “What the Thunder Said” final section of The Waste Land (1922). And as it offers the possibility of an awakening without historical content beyond the streets and their pipes, the rooms, the rounds of tea and “cakes and ices,” it anticipates the very act of forgetting again upon which the The Waste Land is held together.