Contending Heterotopic Artistic Space and Spatial/Stretched Time in T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

Abstract

Arguing against the almost unanimous consensus that the notion of ‘Time’ occupies a position of artistic and thematic centrality in Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (and in Eliot’s other work, mainly the Four Quartets) , this paper attempts to show that the notion of ‘Space’, the seemingly absent, absented and/or camouflaged, constitutes the centre of the poem, overriding the superficial notion of time. Eliot’s distinctive sense of space is examined in the light of Michel Foucault’s concept of ‘Heterotopology’, to show how Prufrock oscillates between various sites in the poem to gain experience, in the process of which geography overtakes knowledge. That is, Prufrock’s dilemma lies in coming to terms with the contending spaces in his psyche, since his journey is a hyperreal wandering through multiple sites of heterotopic space. The contending domains of Prufrock’s psyche (past actions, thoughts, feelings etc.) are artistic, intellectual, philosophic and religious, though mainly artistic and associated with aspects of tradition that Eliot’s individual talent felt anxious about. Thus, the richness of Eliot’s poem lies in its intense recruitment of past poetry, art, poets, authors, philosophers and artists, becoming hence a space/place for contest between those various revisited sites and itself.