other observations and prufrock

Peter Stephenson · 01 Mar 1999, 15:05 · from urth-v0024.mbox · original

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>
Subject: (urth) other observations and prufrock
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 1999 16:05:16 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0024-0027 at digest.urth.net>
X-Urthmirror-Source: http://www.urth.net/urth/archives/v0024/0027.shtml
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable

I would tend to caution against seeing Prufrock as anyone too specific ---
he may well be a horny old man, but Eliot is saying `there's a lot of it
about'.  To me he stands for all (or much of) the impotence and apathy of
the modern world, just as, for example, the `small house agent's clerk' in
the Wasteland (`one of the poor on whom assurance sits Like a silk hat on a
Bradford millionaire', not guaranteed to be an exact quotation) stands for
its degeneration and pettiness.

For that reason, I don't think there are many general structural resonances
between Prufrock and Wolfe, even Peace, since Wolfe's major characters
often have wide-reaching, if subtle, effects on the universes of the novels
--- Weer certainly does, however negative they may seem in retrospect; if
Weer's tale is of being part of other people's stories (which is a very
nice idea), then to a lot of them he's been a golem in the gears, which
Prufrock was never capable of being.  But I'm agog to hear any specific
thoughts.

till human voices wake us,
corncrake

--=20
Peter Stephenson <pws at ibmth.df.unipi.it>       Tel: +39 050 844536
WWW:  http://www.ifh.de/~pws/
Dipartimento di Fisica, Via Buonarroti 2, 56127 Pisa, Italy

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net